Developers finally have a Pinterest API of note—though the social network is inching open its doors rather than swinging them wide. Today the firm launched a beta Pinterest Developers Platform, described as "a suite of APIs for developers to build apps and integrations that bring pins to life."

The API, or application programming interface, lets coders build all kinds of apps on top of Pinterest's data. (See our API explainer.) The official examples include an app that orders ingredients from a recipe "pin"—pins being the visual bookmarks that serve as Pinterest's analogue to Facebook updates and Twitter tweets—and one that arranges bookings based on a travel pin.

For now the program is only open to developers in the U.S., and they have to go through an application process first. The beta API allows developers to access an authorized user's pins, boards and followers, as well as boards, users and interests the user is following.

Board access extends to reading a board's pins and creating, updating and deleting an authorized user's boards. In addition developers can get details of specific Pins as well as create, update and delete them.

TechCrunch reports that users will get full control over which apps are authorized, with the ability to revoke credentials at any time, and Pinterest won't tolerate shady practices. The social network began work on an API in September, TechCrunch says.

A Different Kind Of Network

The thought of getting busy with Pinterest integration is sure to leave developers drooling. Unlike larger social networks, it promotes a much more positive, aspirational outlook on life. Weddings, food, architecture, travel, design, fashion ... these are the areas where Pinterest excels.

Pinterest stands to benefit too. More ways to utilize the underlying platform means more reason for users to sign up and stick around. Maybe you'll take more care over your dream holidays board if there's an app that can help you make a booking off the back of it.

This isn't Pinterest's first API, but it is the first that's really of use to developers in both its scope and its functionality. Be warned, though: Pinterest says only a few hundred developers are going to be allowed through the gates while it scales up the technology behind the new tools.

Another Facebook News Feed tweak has been attracting attention this week, not for the first (or last) time. In addition to three significant changes, it brings yet another reminder that we're all at the mercy of its algorithms. Whether you're a million-dollar publishing empire or a mother with some baby pictures, it's largely up to Facebook just how many other people are going to get to see your post.

The New New News Feed

About those News Feed changes. First, if yours happens to be a little on the sparse side (did all your friends leave for Snapchat?), Facebook will now show you more posts from the contacts you do have rather than let you reach the "end" of your feed.

Second, Facebook will now favor updates "posted directly by the friends you care about" in your News Feed. If there are certain people you interact with more often, you'll see more posts by them. If you spend a lot of time clicking and commenting on links from the New York Times, you'll see more material from that page, too.

Third and last, you won't see as many posts and comments from your friends on pages you're not connected with. Uncle Ed might love Coca-Cola's Facebook presence, but unless you've also liked the Coca-Cola page, you won't see Uncle Ed's love-in with the sugary soda drink quite as much as you did before.

With online publishers relying so heavily on Facebook for traffic, tweaks like this merit close study, since they can send referral traffic soaring or plummeting. The third part of this latest reconfiguration has been widely seen as a blow for sites and brands looking for as many eyeballs as possible, though it's going to be a while before we know the full effects of the changes.

Facebook's also exploring the possibility of hosting content from key publishers itself rather than linking out to it. When you attract the attention of more than 1.4 billion users, then you get to call the shots on what gets priority and what doesn't.

With each of us having so many connections on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and his band of engineers have to take some editorial control over what pops up in the News Feed—a flat stream of everything that was happening in sequential order wouldn't be much fun at all.

But it's interesting to weigh the question of exactly what users want to see. Why do we log into Facebook in 2015? Is it more for updates from friends or links of interest? Facebook is always keen to emphasize that its tweaks are based on user feedback, and our tastes are always changing—hence the re-emergence of instant messenger-style apps.

News Feed algorithm updates will always generate plenty of comment and discussion from publishers, but they say as much about social networking and our virtual relationships with our friends as they do about the future of news.

Lead image courtesy of Facebook; photo of Mark Zuckerberg by Owen Thomas for ReadWrite

Ending a marriage is never easy, but Facebook may be able to streamline the process. The de facto platform for communication for just about everyone, the social network could take on a new role as a place to serve divorce papers.

This week, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper granted 26-year-old Ellanora Baidoo permission to serve papers to her elusive husband, Victor Sena Blood-Dzraku, via a Facebook message. People have served legal notices before using the network, but Baidoo’s case is one of the few in the U.S., and the first here that legally recognizes it as a means of official communication in divorce proceedings.

Sounds handy, but that doesn't mean Facebook messages universally hold up as official courtroom communication. Right now, the rules vary—which may be bad for efficiency, but good for staving off any wacky ideas tech companies could possibly have to monetize our woes.

You Got Served

When it comes to serving court papers, procedures can differ across state and county lines. But in general, they can be rather picky about what constitutes proper legal notification.

Email or fax doesn’t legally count. In most cases, you have to either mail the documents to the last known address or physically hand them to the person (usually through a third-party service). If nothing else works, you can also publish the notice in the newspaper—which is what typically what happens when you can’t reach a deadbeat spouse.

Justice Cooper's decision seems to put Facebook messages on par with postal mail, but with a caveat: As the judge wrote in the court documents, the "transmittal shall be repeated by plaintiff’s attorney to defendant once a week for three consecutive weeks or until acknowledged,” to prove that the papers have been received.

Invoking the social network was a last resort. Sena Blood-Dzraku's whereabouts in the real world were unknown. But because he communicated with his estranged wife via phone calls and Facebook, Baidoo knew where to find him online. Her lawyer first attempted to serve Sena Blood-Dzraku through his client’s Facebook account last week. So far, he hasn't responded.

Friending The Courts

Facebook may have unwittingly made itself more appealing for courtroom communications. In trying to appeal to businesses and other users, it has implemented read receipts for messages and promised more secure messaging.

That may be enough for some judges at the state level, where divorce proceedings take place, but it's not at all clear that all judges or lawmakers agree. As it is, some seem more concerned about electronic communication than others.

Facebook makes plenty of promises about security and privacy, but in light of recent well-publicized hacking incidents, worries run high. The social network (and any other messaging service) would have to lock their systems down enough to satisfactorily safeguard confidential court papers. It's also hard to overlook issues like account abandonment or simple carelessness. Even if the message was marked as read, it’s all too easy to deny being served if a friend used the account, or if the Facebook account was accessed on a shared computer used by roommates or others.

Despite these complications, it's likely just a matter of time before digital communications will become more legitimized in legal settings—just as they have in medical, banking and other areas. The upside is that replacing paper-bound documents with electronic notices can boost efficiency. The down side: It might not be long before Facebook, Gmail or other services try to monetize our legal scuffles.

If you send or receive divorce papers, will you suddenly start getting ads like this? No thanks.

Some major restructuring is going on at Google+, and it looks like it's the end of the social network as we know it—if that label was ever appropriate in the first place. Long-time Google VP Bradley Horowitz has announced that he's taking the management reins from David Besbris and splitting Google+ into separate services called Photos and Streams at the same time.

For the moment, details on exactly what that means are thin on the ground. Photos is fairly obviously the image taking, editing and sharing elements of Google+, but Streams is something new: It's apparently the river of Google+ posts that's going to be left when everything else has been stripped out. (Hangouts will live on as a standalone messaging/video-conferencing service, although Horowitz won't be managing it.)

"It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users," Horowitz wrote in his post, which gives you some indication of how Google will spin this when it finally gets around to making an official announcement.

Google+ Falls Apart

In an interview with Forbes last week, Google's senior VP of products Sundar Pichai hinted that Google+ was about to be dismantled into separate parts. It's a theme he returned to on stage at Mobile World Congress today, telling Bloomberg's Brad Stone:

For us, Google+ was always two things, one was a stream and a social layer. The stream has a passionate community of users, but the second goal was even larger for us. We're at a point where things like photos and communications are very important, [and] we're reorganizing around that.

While adding that Hangouts would remain a Google product, Pichai didn't elaborate on how Google+ is going to evolve into Streams, or when it would happen. If the "social layer" is decoupled from the posting, +1-ing and commenting aspects of Google+, as Pichai suggests, then the network is likely to become more insular, not less. It's possible that Google is looking for a more instant, real-time, Twitter-style network that can help augment its search results.

Even the dominant player Facebook has been busy diverging into smaller, more focused areas through the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The plethora of experimental apps released separately by Facebook—Messenger, Home, Rooms and Groups—are an indication that the future of social networking lies in smaller apps rather than one all-encompassing platform. It seems like Google has gotten this message as well.

ReadWriteBody is an ongoing series where ReadWrite covers networked fitness and the quantified self.

Under Armour, the fitness-apparel maker, has made its first big move since buying MapMyFitness 14 months ago. It unveiled a new app called Record at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week—one that breaks interesting new ground on the social-fitness front.

When I first tested Record, which is free and available for iOS and Android, I found it to be a mostly unremarkable redesign of MapMyFitness's existing workout-logging apps. It's actually a gender-neutral overhaul of Under Armour Women, an app the MapMyFitness team created to test some new concepts, and it draws heavily on the MapMyFitness team's earlier work, including MapMyFitness's login and social network.

But in one crucial way, Record breaks from MapMyFitness's social architecture—and that could prove key to helping challenge users in their workouts. (Not to mention in pairing MapMyFitness's digital savvy with Under Armour's mindshare in locker rooms and elite training centers.)

The big innovation: Instead of filling your feed with exercise updates from friends who use the app, Record will send you just-in-time updates from Under Armour's stable of athletes with whom it has endorsement deals.

"One of the things I realized when I got to Under Armour is there wasn’t one place where you could get information about all these athletes," says Robin Thurston, Under Armour's senior vice president of Connected Fitness (and former MapMyFitness CEO). "They had an e-commerce site but they didn’t have a content site. All of that content will live on Record. If we do an in-the-gym training plan, that athlete will have a profile on Record."

And that won't just be a static profile, Under Armour hopes—its athletes will be broadcasting updates through Record to everyday exercisers who look to them for inspiration.

Friends Don't Let Friends Slack Off

Since I first started to wield apps in my battle to get fit, I've gotten by with a little help from my friends. MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Nike+ Running and others all have social features that allow us to link up with others trying to lose weight or exercise more.

The notion is that by sending us a cheer when we work out or giving our workout logs a thumbs-up, we'll stay more motivated and more loyal to the apps our friends use.

In the years since those apps were first conceived, our thinking around social networks has been transformed. When fitness apps first popped up on our smartphones, Facebook, with its two-way friend requests, was our dominant model.

Twitter showed the social world a different mode of connection—the follow. You can follow an account on Twitter, with no obligation in return—aside from the online etiquette some insist on of "following back."

That's why journalists and celebrities have flocked to Twitter, which provides room for both intimate friendships and a broadcast-like distance from fans.

In a similar move, Under Armour has overlaid a new concept of following athletes, trainers, and other fitness celebrities in Record, with no requirement that you become "friends."

Finding Fresh Inspiration

This could solve a problem I've encountered with these fitness apps: What if your friends' workouts aren't, well, very interesting? (I often worry mine aren't, though when I've tried to pull back from posting, enough people tell me they like my updates that I keep on broadcasting my activities.)

Most of MapMyFitness's competitors still stick to the friend-request model. It's a tough road to overlay a social graph on top of all the other connections we have, and none seem to have become the dominant player in terms of connections. My friends all seem to use different apps.

Strava is a significant outlier here. That fitness app uses following rather than friend requests, with privacy controls on who can follow you. Given its popularity with elite runners and cyclists, this makes sense: You might not know an athlete socially, but you want to follow their conquest of a particularly tough uphill climb.

I'd likely center my fitness activity on Strava if I were more into running or biking. As it is, I've broadened the range of exercise I pursue to include Olympic lifting, yoga, interval training, and more. I'm constantly looking for new ideas. So if Record can show me interesting athletes to follow, I'm on board.

The problem with Record's initial version—technically 2.0, since it's a reboot of Under Armour Women—is that I haven't found a lot of people I want to follow. I'm not a professional-sports fan, so the football and baseball players or Olympic competitors endorsed by Under Armour don't interest me. (I'm probably an outlier here.) I'd like to see more personal trainers or nontraditional fitness figures in the mix.

The most powerful thing will be when Under Armour starts to blur the line between fitness celebrities and everyday athletic sorts—the kind of person you spot at the gym and chat up to find out their workout secrets.

As LinkedIn has found, it's a big job to shift your users from one social model to another. Under Armour was smart to do this in a new app, rather than to try to get MapMyFitness's existing users to change their behavior wholesale.

There will certainly be a place for the concept of mutual "friend" relationships in fitness apps. Fitness information by itself seems fairly safe to make public. You're not invisible in the real world when you run down the street or lift weights in the gym.

But where fitness data blurs into health or other personal matters, we may want to keep our circles closer. My food diary on MyFitnessPal is friends-only, for example. (I'm having homemade tabbouleh and chicken for lunch, if you insist on knowing.)

Friends still play a role in Record: You can now issue challenges to them, aiming to best each other in distance, number of workouts, or other measures of performance. Again, there's a time and a place when personal connections, not the more distant follow relationship, make sense.

Where Under Armour will have to tread most carefully is with promotional and commercial content. Social networks with follow models are very friendly to the notion of "native" advertisements which appear in a stream of content, and that seems to be part of the plan with Record.

Because I couldn't find many interesting accounts to follow on Record, I ended up following various in-house Under Armour accounts, which have been barraging me with deals. (I spent an embarrassing amount of money on Under Armour kit last year, so I'm all set, thanks.)

Under Armour will need to carefully recruit more athletes and fitness celebrities to use Record and broadcast their activities, photos, and messages to users. The app's new social concept is spot on—but ultimately a social network is only as strong as the community on it.

Facebook is forcing people to use "real" names, a move that could destroy the privacy of people who use stage names or pseudonyms online for both safety and personal reasons.

The social network has long had a "real identity" policy, requiring people to use their legal names. But enforcement of the policy seems to have stepped up recently. Facebook recently emailed some high-profile users of stage names or pseudonyms informing them that they'd be locked out of their accounts until they changed the name on their account.

How Real Are "Real" Names?

One of them is Sister Roma, a well-known member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a San Francisco-based activist group whose members often appear in public in drag. Activists like Roma often use their stage names on Facebook, as that's how most of their friends and acquaintances know them.

In an effort to stop Facebook from targeting people who use pseudonyms on the social network, drag queen Olivia La Garce launched a Change.org petition asking the social network to let performers use their stage names on Facebook accounts.

She writes:

Although our names might not be our "legal" birth names, they are still an integral part of our identities, both personally and to our communities. These are the names we are known by and call each other and ourselves. We build our networks, community, and audience under the names we have chosen, and forcing us to switch our names after years of operating under them has caused nothing but confusion and pain by preventing us from presenting our profiles under the names we have built them up with.

La Garce also points out in a post on her personal Facebook page that thousands of people claim to have the name "Glen Coco," a fictional star in the movie Mean Girls.

Google faced its own name controversy when it launched the Google+ social network and applied heavy restrictions on what names people can use. The so-called #nymwars ended in July when Google finally eliminated naming restrictions.

Danah Boyd, a social media scholar and researcher at Microsoft, calls the "real name" policies abuses of power. In 2011, she criticized Google+ and Facebook for their haphazard name requirements:

What’s at stake is people’s right to protect themselves, their right to actually maintain a form of control that gives them safety. If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable.

It seems quite obvious: Many people don't want to share their real names on the Internet. Yet social media companies still resist this reality.

Facebook told us that if people want to use a pseudonymous name, they have other options:

If people want to use an alternative name on Facebook, they have several different options available to them, including providing an alias under their name on their profile, or creating a Page specifically for that alternative persona. As part of our overall standards, we ask that people who use Facebook provide their real name on their profile.

That's not an acceptable answer for many. Facebook's proposal that drag queens, activists, and other name-variant individuals use Pages deprives them of several key features of the social network, including sending and accepting friend requests and writing private posts.

I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things. If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

Here's how Zuckerberg could lift that burden: Facebook could ask for users' real names as part of their account information, then allow them to put privacy settings on who can see them (perhaps no one), while displaying an alternate name to the rest of the world.

That would satisfy Facebook's desire to know its users' legal names while protecting activists and others who prefer to serve up realness under a different name.

To help newbies sign up and start tweeting, the company has made a number of recent changes. Redesigned profiles, a giant World Cup marketing push, and rejiggering the Home timeline are just part of Twitter's many attempts to make it friendlier for first-time users.

The problem: It's not just Twitter's design or interface that makes it an intimidating service for the average Internet user. It's, well, Twitter users themselves. Habitual Twitter users like me have a habit of tossing out terms and references that are utterly opaque to newcomers:

"Get me out of this Twitter canoe!"

"This picture needs some @darth."

"OH in SOMA: 'when I see someone with grey hair in their profile pic, I'm a little nervous to send them an email.'"

To help new users navigate Twitter's insider vocabulary and obscure etiquette, here's a handy guide. We'll help you paddle through a Twitter canoes, deal with RLRTs, and become an all-star Twitter user.

Start With The Basics

RT (Retweet)

The retweet—RT for short—is a user-created Twitter abbreviation that has become one of the social network’s key features. Retweeting is taking someone else’s tweet and tweeting it into your timeline, with the intent of spreading their words to your followers.

There are a few ways to retweet. Five years ago, Twitter started automating it with the retweet button, and that's the way most people who use Twitter know the feature. On Twitter's mobile app, you also have the option of simply quoting the tweet, which is a much more familiar plain-English way of saying "these are someone else's words.

A newer way is to paste a link to the original tweet, which Twitter will then show embedded in smaller form underneath anything you write about it in your own tweet. It's not exactly retweeting, but it serves a similar purpose.

But before any of those options were available, people manually typed "RT" and the original tweeter's username in front of a tweet they thought was clever or interesting to share with their followers.

Some people still do this, for a variety of reasons:

• They're old-school Twitter users who never dropped the habit.• They're friends with old-school Twitter users who picked up the "RT" convention from them.• They genuinely think typing a manual "RT" makes it clearer who the author was.• They want to add some commentary to a tweet.

Manual retweeting does allow room to add your own words, but there’s some contention over whether or not the manual RT should even be used anymore, as some people see it as taking credit away from the original tweet. Tweet embeds also serve the same purpose as manual retweets for adding commentary, which raises further questions about whether new users should adopt this old convention.

Take a look at this tweet, for example. At a glance, can you tell who wrote it? Is it CNET's Nick Statt? Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien? Security researcher Runa Sandvik? Or The Intercept's Ryan Deveraux?

In fact, Statt did a manual retweet of O'Brien's tweet, which was a retweet-by-quote of Sandvik's tweet, which included a screenshot of an article by Deveraux.

Try explaining that to a brand-new Twitter user.

Fav (Favorite)

When you star someone's tweet, it's considered a fav, or favorite. (Some people prefer the spelling "fave," but "fav" seems more popular among Twitter users.) There are no rules regarding what people favorite. It could mean the tweet made them laugh. It could be a "thank you" for mentioning a specific topic or idea. Or it could simply mean that they want to save it to read later, almost like a Web bookmark.

Historically, favorited tweets, while publicly available if you visit a Twitter user's profile page, have never appeared in people's timelines like retweets. But in an effort to make the service more appealing for new users, Twitter will now display some tweets from strangers that have been favorited by people you follow.

The bottom line: Any tweets you favorite are public, and are more likely to be seen by a wide variety of people now. People may expect you to explain why you hit the star icon on a particularly controversial tweet.

#FF (Follow Friday) And Other Hashtags

In 2009, Micah Baldwin suggested that people start tweeting the usernames of accounts they thought their friends should follow. He dubbed it "Follow Friday."

People rapidly added a way to find these tweets, by marking them with a hashtag. A hashtag is any word or phrase with a hash mark—"#"—at the beginning. You'll see people use hashtags with news events like #Ferguson or #Syria, but Twitter insiders also use them for their own particular conventions. For Follow Friday, it started as #followfriday and then got shortened to #FF

If you’re included in a #FF tweet, be flattered that someone thinks you’re so interesting, they want their followers to follow you, too. You might want to reciprocate by doing your own #FF mentioning them.

It's not normal to do a #FF on any day but Friday. If you see someone doing that, either they've lost track of the date, or they're being sarcastic.

MT (Modified Tweet)

A tweet with an "MT" at the start is a "modified tweet." That's like a retweet, but the author wants to let you know it's not a faithful reproduction of the original tweet. People use it instead of a RT for a few reasons. One is that they want to shorten the original tweet, so they can fit their own commentary inside Twitter's 140-character limit.

People use MT rather liberally. If you see it in a tweet, it could mean the user modified the words after the tweet in an attempt to be funny or sarcastic, or they just shortened the tweet by removing a word or a link so they could add their own opinion ahead of it.

Tweeting IRL (In Real Life)

RLRT (Real-Life Retweet)

If someone said something so amazing in real life that you have to share it on Twitter, use RLRT, which stands for real life retweet. When paired with your friend's Twitter handle, it tells your followers that the person mentioned in the tweet actually said it, and you were there to hear it.

OH (Overheard)

OH means "overheard." An OH is kind of like an RLRT, with an important difference: You're not supposed to name the person who said the thing you're tweeting. Naming someone in an OH is a major breach of Twitter etiquette.

Where Things Get Weird

Twitter Canoe

If you’ve been @-mentioned in a conversation on Twitter that mentions a lot of other users and that doesn't stop until the people involved run out of things to say, congratulations! You’ve been roped into a Twitter canoe.

A canoe is a conversation on Twitter that keeps rolling and adding new people until people get annoyed or bored and stop talking to each other. Adding yourself to a Twitter canoe is a bit of a bold move—etiquette calls for someone to add you first.

Subtweet

Remember that time you were in high school and someone was talking about you right in front of your face, but they never said your name, and yet everyone knew they were talking about you?

A subtweet, or subliminal tweet, is like that, but on Twitter. You might call it passive-aggressive tweeting. Someone tweets something about a person or topic—usually something negative—without actually mentioning that person’s Twitter handle or linking to the topic they’re discussing. That makes it difficult for the person to find—and enraging if they do eventually discover your tweet.

Tweetstorm (Twitterstorm)

When people have a lot of Very Important Things to say that cannot be confined to the constraints of 140 characters, they could write a blog post, right? But no: It's recently become fashionable to deliver long-winded diatribes on Twitter by tweeting multiple times, adding a number and a slash mark—"1/", "2/", "3/", etc.—to each tweet so their followers don’t miss a single thing they say.

This is called a tweetstorm, or Twitterstorm, for the thunderous way these multiple tweets rain down on people's timelines.

Some people really don't like tweetstorms, so expect some backlash if you decide to engage in one. But there's a right way and a wrong way to tweetstorm. After you begin your tweetstorm with a "1/", make sure you start your next tweet by replying to that first tweet. Make every subsequent tweet a reply to the previous one. That will make sure that anyone who encounters your tweetstorm can find the entire series easily.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is largely blamed for popularizing the tweetstorm. Note: Andreessen has a perfectly good blog.

@darth

@darth is a mysterious Twitter user who entertains people with his epic Photoshops, retweets of adorable animals, and the creation of visual memes—catchy combinations of images and text that are easy to modify and pass around. Some of his best work appears in response to ideas that are trending on Twitter as hashtags, like #conspiracybooks.

No one has yet unearthed Darth's true identity, so we only know him as Twitter’s resident Darth-Vader-helmet-wearing red panda. If your dog is cute enough, he might just Photoshop him.

A tip to the wise: If you see an image you love in Darth's feed, make sure to save it to your phone or PC. For some reason, Darth chooses to delete older tweets, so if you miss a great Darth Photoshop, it could be gone forever.

One night while binge-watching the first season of Glee, after the third anachronistic reference to terpsichorean teens adding each other on the then-dominant social network MySpace, it hit me: The friend request is dead.

If not dead, then it's at least moribund as a way of expressing our online ties to other humans.

Foursquare Joins Team Followback

In the course of relaunching its app with a new logo and a new emphasis on tips about local restaurants and shops, Foursquare has also eliminated the notion of "friends." You now follow people you're interested in to see the tips they leave, but there's no requirement that they follow you back.

That's because, as Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley noted to ReadWrite, Foursquare has removed the check-in feature which broadcasts your locations to a designated set of friends, moving it to a separate app called Swarm. Since you're no longer sharing private information like your whereabouts, the friend model of social interactions no longer makes sense for Foursquare.

LinkedIn, as ReadWrite recently observed, has quietly added a "Follow" button to millions of users' profiles. That, too, is a reflection of the service's changing priorities. While you can still connect to your contacts, LinkedIn also wants you to be able to keep tabs on users who are publishing business-oriented essays and articles on the site. While the Follow button is hard to find right now, expect it to become more prominent on LinkedIn over time.

That's similar to a change Facebook made in 2011, when it introduced a "Subscribe" button, which let you track public updates from a person without becoming their friend. As ReadWrite founder Richard MacManus noted at the time, this was an attempt to encourage more public activity on Facebook. (In 2012, Facebook adopted the more common "Follow" language for this button.)

Everyone Follows Twitter

The reason why Facebook, which has spread the idea of mutual friending to more than a billion people, wanted to hedge its social bets with the option for a one-way interaction, was simple: Twitter envy.

Twitter didn't invent the idea of subscribing to a feed of updates, but it certainly popularized the notion. By making "Follow" the way we interacted with another account, Twitter let us track friends, celebrities, strangers, dogs, bots, and other oddities.

While less intimate than a friend request, the act of following ultimately proved more revealing. While Facebook's friends list might show who we know, our Twitter follow list unveiled who we are.

That's why Facebook mimicked Twitter's model—though its friend features were far too established to change. And it's part of the reason why it bought Instagram, which launched with a Twitter-like follow model.

That's why LinkedIn, too, is trying to supplement your list of connections with a new list of people you follow. And it's why Foursquare has dumped friends altogether, in a radical act of social reinvention.

I'll Be There For You

There's still a place for friends in social apps. Messaging tools like Snapchat are an obvious place where you need a two-way connection. But those apps increasingly rely on our phones' address books rather than a carefully constructed list of friends.

Anonymous apps like Secret also change the notion of "friends." Instead of asking you to reveal yourself through a friend request, Secret asks you if it can scan your address book and Facebook friends list. You'll then see those people's posts, though not their names. It's a different model of friendship—one that does away with the friend request.

Expect more services which followed Facebook's lead in requiring a two-way dance of friending to drop it in favor of Twitter's simpler follow model, especially ones that deal with nonsensitive information.

Yelp is a prime candidate. My Yelp inbox has a message from a friend I've known since middle school: "Your reviews are really great, I'd love to keep in touch on Yelp." That boilerplate is nonsense: We don't need to "keep in touch on Yelp," and my friend shouldn't have to beg to see my reviews.

Pinterest has an interesting twist on the follow concept. Instead of following people, you follow their image boards. (You can opt to follow all boards by an individual, but in Pinterest's interface, there's no way to follow them as a person.)

It's especially intriguing to think about how the follow model might play out in online retail. Etsy, the online store favored by crafters, has adopted the follow model, letting you track activity by another shopper or a merchant. Square lets you follow "lists" on its Square Market e-commerce site—a model closer to Pinterest's.

Amazon.com, one of the very first Internet giants to add social features—remember when you'd enter in your friends' birthdays to get reminders?—has mostly botched this opportunity.

What you're not likely to see, as Amazon and others experiment with adding social features to their sites, is the return of the friend request. Those apps that require a two-way connection will rely on established stores of connections by tapping into our Facebook friends or our phones' address books. Those that don't will go for the follow model, which has clearly won out. We all follow the leader.

With LinkedIn’s publishing platform, anyone can share their professional expertise in a long-form post, and anyone can follow you and read it. The publishing platform generates over 30,000 weekly long-form posts, according to LinkedIn. Basically, it opens up a wider audience for LinkedIn members—mutual following is not required. (As ReadWrite reported earlier today, LinkedIn has quietly but dramatically expanded the option to follow other members.)

When LinkedIn opened up the publishing platform to just 25,000 members in February, it stressed the importance of building a professional brand, and that publishing is one way to do it.

When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled.

To publish a post on LinkedIn, simply click the status bar the way you would if you were writing an update. In the right corner—if you've been granted publishing privileges—there’s a pencil icon to create a post. When you click on it, it will push you into a composer, and you can start writing.

If you don’t have access to the publishing platform yet, you will soon. LinkedIn is slowly rolling it out to more members.

A gigantic change is quietly sweeping through LinkedIn. Millions of members now have a "Follow" button, a feature that promises to transform how we think about our interactions on the professional network.

ReadWrite has found, and LinkedIn has confirmed to us, that a far broader set of users can now broadcast their activity to followers who don't need to formally connect with them to see what they're doing.

This shift is more profound than it may first sound. It makes LinkedIn less like a work-oriented Facebook and more like a professionally oriented Twitter or Tumblr, minus the sports chatter and cat GIFs. You'll spend less time interacting with people you already know on LinkedIn, and more with people you want to know, based on the information they're sharing.

"We have started to ramp the ability for members to follow other member's public activity feeds," says Julie Inouye, a LinkedIn spokesperson. "This is happening alongside our efforts to expand the publishing tool to all members and making it possible for members to be followed for their posts."

The "Follow" button is not easy to find at the moment. It appears next to some posts when users log into the home page. But the surest way to find it is to navigate to a member's profile, click a dropdown menu next to the "Connect" button, and select "View recent activity." That takes you to a page where there's a prominent yellow "Follow" button.

While it's not clear if the "Follow" button is on every member's profile, in ReadWrite's extensive testing, we didn't find any profiles which lacked the button. That suggests it is now widely distributed throughout the network.

Only Connect

For most of LinkedIn's history, the only way you could see another member's activity was to connect with them—a two-way link which suggested you both knew each other professionally and were willing to vouch for each other's skills and reputation.

That began changing in 2012, when LinkedIn introduced its Influencers program, which began with a couple hundred world-famous business leaders selected by a small in-house editorial team.

While LinkedIn emphasized the interesting articles that the likes of Richard Branson and Jack Welch were publishing, I was more intrigued by a small "Follow" button that now appeared on those celebrity profiles.

It makes far more sense to follow a business celebrity like Branson than to connect with him—not that that stopped some of LinkedIn's more avid networkers from trying.

But it struck me at the time that the "Follow" button actually made a lot of sense for a large number of LinkedIn members with any kind of public profile in their industry—journalists, marketers, analysts, investors, and the like.

At the time, I asked why LinkedIn didn't roll this out to everyone. LinkedIn's long-suffering PR team politely thanked me for the feedback and said they'd pass it on to the product team.

It turns out LinkedIn had a long-term plan, which we first began to see in February. LinkedIn announced that it was expanding its self-publishing platform, starting with a very small set of 25,000 members who could now write longer posts, not just short updates. Those 25,000 members also got a "Follow" button.

While this was the real debut of the "Follow" button, it drew vanishingly little attention at the time, because it only appeared on 0.01 percent of LinkedIn's user profiles.

Public Works

So why will you want to follow people, even if they're not publishing longer posts?

"Being able to follow someone's actions and comments and interests that they're making in a public forum lets you glean insights from that person," says Inouye.

More private details like job changes, work anniversaries, and other profile updates will continue to be seen only by connections, unless you've explicitly made that information public in your settings.

LinkedIn's ability to distinguish between these layers of public and semiprivate information is the result of years of work rearchitecting the service. (Among other things, this work enabled LinkedIn to introduce a long-requested block feature.)

LinkedIn's activity feeds for users have a URL that begins with "linkedin.com/pulse," which suggests it is closely tied to LinkedIn Pulse, the umbrella term for LinkedIn's content efforts which includes a newsreading service on LinkedIn's website and mobile apps. LinkedIn's publishing-platform posts are distributed through Pulse, as are links from outside publishers and members' activities.

Changing the model of how members link to each other from connecting to following is a key part of the shift LinkedIn has made from networking, dealmaking, and recruiting to displaying and sharing professional knowledge—less Facebook, more Bloomberg. While connecting won't go away, it will likely become a smaller piece of the LinkedIn experience over time.

A Data Point To Follow

For prodigious LinkedIn networkers who liked the old model of accumulating two-way connections, the new "Follow" button offers one additional bonus, though it will soon vanish.

LinkedIn has long obscured the number of connections members have once it exceeds 500, to discourage people from ostentatiously trying to boost their stats. But if you go to a user's activity feed page, where the "Follow" button appears, you'll see the number of followers they have, a figure which includes their current two-way connections. (By default, all of your connections also follow your public updates.)

Because very few users have had the chance to make use of the "Follow" button yet, in most cases, that number will equal their current number of connections.

In May, Caldwell announced that App.net, a Twitter-like platform for information distribution which sought to operate through user subscriptions rather than advertising, would no longer have any employees, himself included.

"I don't think it means less of an involvement than what I anticipated when I wrote that post in May," Caldwell told ReadWrite in an email. "Now that I have my full-time job figured out I think I will be able to have a better sense of how to balance my time across projects."

In a reply to an App.net user who asked about his continuing role at App.net, Caldwell also noted that Y Combinator was "the sort of gig where it's OK/encouraged to work on projects that interest me alongside my full-time job."

While App.net offered them that independence, and freedom from the sometimes arbitrary changes Twitter and Facebook have made to their platforms, Caldwell's salvo at the social giants has not delivered on other things a software builder might want, like a large set of consumers they can reach with their wares.

It's not clear, for example, how Backer, App.net's service for raising funds to build software features, will deliver on its promise that App.net staff "will help out developers" with marketing and advice, given that App.net no longer has any staff.

"At this point the main focus is on keeping the service running well, and trying to let things organically happen," Caldwell told us. "For instance, will Backer start getting used more or less? Will new interesting tools or products that use the API be released?"

Caldwell said he and Berg want to "let things settle down some more before deciding which direction to take."

Perhaps, at Y Combinator, Caldwell can spark someone else's dream to build a successor to App.net—one that can thrive as an independent force and a counterbalance to the dominant social platforms that hem in developers.

Photo of Bryan Berg and Dalton Caldwell and App.net hackathon by Jon Mitchell for ReadWrite

Every morning, my phone fills up with notification badges—a dozen little inboxes asking to be cleared before I even get to my email. Dutifully or obsessively, I open them all as I walk my dog.

There's a special pleasure I take in swiping through LinkedIn Contacts, a standalone app from the professional network. Job changes, work anniversaries, and mentions in news articles add up to a customized newsletter about people I know through my world of work.

LinkedIn is doubling down on this aspect of its Contacts app for iPhones, and it's even renaming the app LinkedIn Connected in an update available in the App Store Thursday morning.

LinkedIn Plays Its Cards Right

The first thing you'll notice about LinkedIn Connected is its visual design, which uses the "card" metaphor you now find everywhere from Twitter to Tinder to iPhones. Where LinkedIn Contacts had blurbs next to small profile photos, Connected presents each person's news on a full-screen card.

There's less weight in the interface given to looking up contact information, though you can still do that.

"What we heard from members is that the updates are the value," says LinkedIn's David Brubacher, who oversees the company's relationship products. Most, like me, used the old Contacts app in the morning while preparing for their day.

The hope is that Connected's updates will prompt users to send messages through LinkedIn and use the service for more than just job hunting.

Connected also syncs more directly with the iPhone's calendar, if users permit it, to find meetings with your contacts and give you a LinkedIn-powered briefing book on the people you're spending your day with. (Contacts did something similar, but only with Web-based calendars.)

Reconnecting With Users

As a new and improved version of Contacts, an app that's become habit-forming for me, Connected looks like a winner. And LinkedIn could use a winner in mobile.

Connected seems far less likely to spark such worries. For one thing, it's so clearly useful (and a little addicting).

With LinkedIn's new app, Miranda Priestly might not have needed two assistants to remember her contacts.

And there are futuristic hints within Connected of how it could become even more useful—like the assistants whispering names and biographical details in Miranda Priestly's ear in The Devil Wears Prada.

LinkedIn engineering director Vinodh Jayaram says the way Connected combines calendar and contacts data to pop up timely information about people you're about to meet is an example of "anticipatory computing," similar to what Google does with its Google Now service or Foursquare does with its location-based recommendations.

If you want to get really crazy, imagine a location-aware version of LinkedIn Connected designed for wearable devices. It would whisper to you or flash an alert on your wrist to tell you how you know all the people in the room, moments before you rub elbows with them. That's what networking looks like when it's truly networked.

Researchers recently published a paper that detailed how they manipulated the emotions of 689,003 Facebook users in 2012, in an effort to determine whether positive and negative posts had an effect on their moods.

It turns out that yes, people feel differently and thus post differently, when they see positive or negative posts in their feeds.

The researchers conducted another unwitting experiment on themselves and their employer: Would revealing such an experiment enrage ordinary Facebook users as well as the academic and scientific community? The answer, they learned over the past weekend, was decidedly yes.

The Facebook Experiments

Researchers ran two parallel experiments for one week in January 2012. In one, they modified the Facebook news feed algorithm to show fewer positive posts in select people’s timelines. Another group saw fewer negative posts.

From the paper, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks":

We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.

The study was conducted by researchers from Cornell University and the University of California San Francisco, along with Adam Kramer, a data scientist at Facebook.

It’s impossible to know if you were one of the people that “participated” in this study, not just because Facebook randomly selected these participants, but because users were not told they were being used in this science experiment. Normally, when someone participates in a scientific study, they give “informed consent,” meaning they agree to being used for fodder in research, and are aware of the study being conducted.

Facebook didn’t ask participants for consent. Instead, the paper claimed that because users had consented to Facebook’s Data Use Policy—which, if you have a Facebook account, you’ve agreed to—it gave them permission to use them as test subjects.

Nowhere in the policy does it say users consent to having emotions manipulated in the name of science. Rather, it says that information may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” And, as Kashmir Hill at Forbes discovered, Facebook didn't include the "research" portion of the Data Use Policy until May 2012, months after this particular study was conducted.

Professor James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Maryland, says that the idea of users consenting to scientific studies by way of the company’s terms of service is “bogus.”

“When we do research we have informed consent—that extra word matters,” Grimmelmann told me in an interview. “[Facebook] doesn’t disclose that it will manipulate what it shows you, at all.”

How To Avoid Being A Test Subject

So, if Facebook is claiming that simply by being a Facebook user you are giving the company consent to use your information for scientific research, how can you opt out?

Well, you can opt out of Facebook.

Unlike the privacy settings you can change if you don’t want strangers looking at your profile or selfies, you can’t tell Facebook not to use your data. Just by being a Facebook user means you’re giving the company the ability to manipulate your news feed in an effort to analyze human behavior, even if that means your own feelings will change.

Consider that this paper details an experiment conducted two and a half years ago. What has Facebook been doing in the meantime? Are you a guinea pig right now for some Facebook experiment to be revealed in the future?

Thanks to the Data Use Policy, you don’t know.

On Facebook, You’re Just A Data Point

Of course, Facebook manipulates your feelings whether you realize it or not. In this particular study, researchers were trying to figure out how emotions affect what you post on Facebook, and how best to keep you posting on Facebook. But in other cases, it’s all about advertising.

Facebook is a free service, and instead of paying for the convenience in dollars, we pay for it in data. Everything you post on Facebook, all the information you give it, allows Facebook to target you with personalized advertising. And it’s not just Facebook-based posts or likes anymore, but your activity across the entire Web.

Some people, like Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, argue that what Facebook did with the “emotional contagion” experiment is no different than other types of advertising-related testing Facebook does.

But with advertising on Facebook, we know what we’re getting. The ads are actively shown to us, and tailored to our own interests. We trade our information for the ability to use an ad-supported service. And we have some limited ability to opt out of such targeting.

“If you don’t tell people what the tradeoff is, you can’t make a choice,” Grimmelmann said. “With Facebook, the tradeoff they tell you about is, we will show you ads. That’s what you seem to think the data they're collecting is going to be used for.”

Ultimately, the study was a way for Facebook to figure out how to prevent people leaving the service because using it was making them feel bad.

The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. [emphasis added]

There are a number of ways this Facebook experiment could have been designed not to anger quite so many people. For instance, had Facebook asked users to participate in a study to research the impacts of social media on behavior, the ethical question regarding manipulation of positive and negative emotions wouldn’t even exist.

In that post, Kramer apologized for "for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused” and acknowledged that "the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety."

This study bridges the worlds of academia and Silicon Valley’s tech culture. For years, Facebook’s mantra was “move fast and break things”—even, apparently, users' trust.

“There’s a difference in expectations between those two worlds,” Grimmelmann said. “It exposes a real lack of ethical cognition underlying a lot of the Valley’s data practices.”

On Facebook, we’re now accustomed to giving up our data, and in exchange, seeing ads for companies we might buy stuff from. For the company to take that data we share with them and use it for purposes not listed in its privacy policy turns Facebook’s more than one billion users into potential test subjects, whether they want to be or not.

Until Facebook changes its practices, there's only one way to assuredly remove yourself as a candidate for a scientific experiment: Delete your Facebook account.

Update 5:25 p.m.: Updated to note that Facebook didn't include "research" in its Data Use Policy until May 2012, months after the initial research was conducted.

On Monday, Google announced the end of its first foray into social networking, Orkut. September 30, 2014 will be the 10-year-old network’s final day.

ReadWrite has been covering underdog Orkut since its invention. We followed its rise to dominance in India and Brazil and its ever-constant (if somewhat understated) battle with Facebook for the eyeballs of international social media users.

We took a peek into the archives to highlight some major moments in Orkut history.

May 2009: Facebook began battling Orkut in earnest. Noticing Orkut’s presence in India, Facebook became conveniently available in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, and all other Indian languages. The announcement came after Zuckerberg made a trip to India to talk with technologists.

February 2009: Orkut made the news when the Supreme Court of India denied legal protection to a teen being sued over comments he made on Orkut. The case set a global precedent for how far freedom of speech extends over social media.

October 2010: Even as Facebook was growing in adoption all over the world, Orkut held on steadfastly to its Brazilian majority. Orkut must have really liked futbol.

June 2011: Google launches Google+, making it look as if the company saw the writing on the wall when it came to Orkut. It may or may not be coincidence that the shutdown of Orkut was announced almost exactly three years after the launch of Google+.

January 2012: After a lot of effort, including Mark Zuckerberg making a trip to Brazil to spread the Facebook gospel, Facebook finally overtook Orkut in the one country it still dominated.

June 2014: Our first time mentioning Orkut since Facebook overtook it in Brazil. Unlike the dropped bomb that was Google Reader, Orkut enjoyed a slow decline. Now that it’s gone, Google said it will devote its “energy and resources” on YouTube, Blogger and Google+.

On Friday, a judge ruled that LinkedIn must face a lawsuit brought by customers who claim LinkedIn accessed their external email accounts like Gmail and Yahoo in order to bombard their contacts with unwanted LinkedIn invites.

You’d need to read LinkedIn’s terms of service closely to learn that when you give LinkedIn access to your email accounts, the company pulls data from your emails to recruit new members. And you'd have to read through a lot of verbiage to discover that LinkedIn warns you that it will send out invites that look like they’re from you. Nowhere does it explicitly warn you that LinkedIn will follow up with repeated invites, making you look like a needy friend.

(Oh, you didn't even bother to read the terms of service? Well, then those spammy invites your friends received in their email are all on you.)

This is the crux of a lawsuit brought by a group of users that raises questions about how much data companies can collect, and what they do with that information. U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh said Friday in her ruling that LinkedIn members who sued the company can pursue damages, as they try to expand their case to include other users, Bloomberg reported.

Koh rejected some wild conspiracy-theory claims LinkedIn members advanced that the company was somehow “hacking" into their email accounts, finding they’d consented to give it access.

“We will continue to contest the remaining claims, as we believe they have no merit,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told ReadWrite.

Giving Up Our Privacy, One Click At A Time

And yet there is merit to the idea that something is happening when we use online services like LinkedIn that puts our digital lives out of our control.

The suit hangs on the fact that LinkedIn users consent once to sending an email. The plaintiffs allege that LinkedIn then sends numerous follow-up invitations to people’s contacts, a practice Koh said in her ruling was grounds to move forward with the lawsuit.

Soon, a lawsuit like this one might be a dinosaur.

An increasing trend is for corporations to erode not just our privacy, but our right to protest these invasions, by taking advantage of terms of service—implied contracts with customers—to shield them from lawsuits like this.

Instead, they rewrite their terms to favor procedures like mandatory arbitration, a process which many legal advocates believe favor corporations. Dropbox made this change in February (though it allows users to opt out of the change).

Two Supreme Court decisions in 2011 and 2013 have made it possible for companies to quietly revise the terms of service users rarely read, in an effort to forestall any consequences for abusing user privacy, like those alleged in the LinkedIn suit.

The decisions culminate a thirty-year trend during which the judiciary, including initially some prominent liberal jurists, has moved to eliminate courts as a means for ordinary Americans to uphold their rights against companies. The result is a world where corporations can evade accountability and effectively skirt swaths of law, pushing their growing power over their consumers and employees past a tipping point.

This could theoretically put us in a world where Facebook could quietly change its terms of service to make the private information of its more than one billion users public—and there'd be almost nothing you could do about it, save quit in a huff.

It’s easy to lecture people about how important it is read the fine print you’re consenting to before sharing your private data. But we have lives to live, work to do, and families to see—all higher priorities than wading through Internet legalese.

And it's not like we have any choice about these terms if we want to use a popular website. There’s no negotiating terms—only abject surrender.

I know I’m guilty of agreeing to terms of an app or website that I haven’t fully read.

But cases like LinkedIn’s contact-email lawsuit serve as a reminder for all: The scales are tipped against us when it comes to protecting our privacy. We constantly trade convenience for control over our own online lives. And soon, we may have no recourse.

Sometimes a movement is born from just a few, powerful words shared and spoken by people around the world—and it can start with just a hashtag.

#YesAllWomen, a collective online response to the recent shootings in Isla Vista, Calif., may be one of those movements.

Yes, All Women: You Are Not Alone

Hashtags, once an obscure practice favored by tech insiders, now mainstream thanks to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, are created by putting a hash mark—"#"—in front of a word or phrase. You're more likely to see them on television programs and otherwise tied to pop-culture phenomena, so advertisers and TV networks can better track what people care about.

But when people use hashtag to create a dialogue around an issue, they become more meaningful than water cooler chatter. They become the conversation, and can create action. Just think back to the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, when citizens of oppressive regimes learned through social networks that they were far from alone. As a result, they took to the streets—and governments fell.

#YesAllWomen began making the rounds after a tragic shooting, but its message transcends a singular act of violence. People are using it to highlight the harassment, discrimination and bias women face every day.

From "Not All Men” To #YesAllWomen

On Friday, a violent rampage left seven people dead, including the gunman, near the University of California campus in Isla Vista, just outside of Santa Barbara, Calif. In a video manifesto the 22-year-old shooter, Elliot Rodger, shared online, he claimed that he wanted to punish the women who rejected him for years, despite being a “perfect guy.”

#YesAllWomen is a reaction to more than just Rodger's warped beliefs. It extends an idea that has been discussed for months—the excuse that “not all men" are misogynistic. This far-too-common response to any discussion of women’s lives angers feminists. They view the "not all men” argument as an attempt by men to shift blame and thereby excuse themselves from conversation about harassment or gender-based violence.

Rodger blamed women for his misery, and, in response, women took to social media to talk about being victims of gender-based harassment, violence, and discrimination, sharing stories of the misogynistic acts that happened to them every day. The shooter blamed women—all women—for his unhappiness. So women on Twitter flipped his psychotic rant around and turned it into a call for sanity—something powerful and empowering.

Not all men are like Rodger. But what #YesAllWomen demonstrates is that yes, all women live in fear because there are men who discriminate against them, who are violent against them, who sexually assault them.

The hashtag is still a trending topic on Twitter, and has sparked a public conversation that, before Twitter, may have been impossible. (While the #YesAllWomen hashtag is also prominent on Facebook, the design of that social network makes it harder for these conversations to surface there.)

Through 140 characters and a public platform, a handful of people can turn a violent tragedy into a national conversation. The Isla Vista shooting prompted the hashtag, but it quickly turned a dialogue about gender discrimination and rape culture.

For people who have never experienced what the women on Twitter are talking about, following the #YesAllWomen hashtag can be difficult and hard to relate to. Though each tiny memoir is different, and ranges from outright violence to subtle discrimination, the stories echo one another: Women are still suffering at the hands of men.

For women who have lived through these experiences, the #YesAllWomen conversation makes them feel less isolated. And while it’s not clear what shape this movement will take, the Arab Spring experience suggests that people who learn they are not alone are more prone to take action.

People might not agree with every tweet; people rarely do. But by reading the conversation with an open mind, it’s likely everyone will learn something. All women, and all men.

Get ready to feel really awkward on LinkedIn. The professional social network introduced a new feature Wednesday that turns logging on to LinkedIn into a game-like experience by showing you how you stack up against other people in your network.

If you’re familiar with the universe of The Hunger Games, LinkedIn, once a safe place to share news articles and network, has turned into some kind of digital Panem, and we are all now volunteering as tribute.

Called How You Rank, the feature is a new part of Who’s Viewed Your Profile, the statistics dashboard on your account that shows you which people are looking at your LinkedIn page. How You Rank lets users see how popular their profiles are in relationship to other people in their network.

For instance, I rank 120 out of 604, and I’m in the top 20% of profile views among my connections.

LinkedIn’s new popularity contest will no doubt encourage people to scramble around to get more views on their profile, which will no doubt increase the social network's page views—a metric closely watched by analysts on Wall Street, where the company faces its own kind of ruthless ranking against other Internet companies.

The How You Rank page shows you what percentile you rank for profile views among your connections, which connections have been viewed the most, and how much those numbers have increased in the last two weeks. The right hand side of the How You Rank dashboard features personalized suggestions on how to get more people to look at your profile, like updating your summary, joining targeted groups, or adding a specific skill.

By following LinkedIn’s tips, you’ll spend more time perfecting your profile and competing with professionals you might not know personally—as if there wasn’t enough competition in the workplace already.

Google+ is still figuring out where it fits among other social identity managers like Facebook and Twitter since it launched in 2011. But Vic Gundotra, head of Google+ since its inception, will not be there to see its eventual epiphany.

Today Gundotra, who has spent eight years at Google, announced he is leaving the company with, predictably, a post on Google+.

"I have been incredibly fortunate to work with the amazing people of Google. I don't believe there is a more talented and passionate collection of people anywhere else," he wrote. "And I'm overwhelmed when I think about the leadership of Larry Page and what he empowered me to do while at Google."

Prior to becoming "Google's Social Czar" and leading Google+, Gundotra was responsible for the company's mobile and developer relations teams and mobile applications, and started the company's Google I/O developer conference.

According to a report from Recode, VP of engineering David Besbris, not Google+ product head Bradley Horowitz, will replace Gundotra.

Who Speaks For Google+?

Google has described Google+ as the company's "social spine," providing features like login and sharing across multiple Google properties. But it may take a less central role now.

According to a former Googler familiar with the company's organization, Bresbis, formerly Google+'s engineering director, will likely not take Gundotra's seat on Google's so-called "L team"—the senior executives who report directly to Google CEO Larry Page and run large product groups like YouTube, Android, and advertising.

Gundotra's departure could even lead to a dismantling of Google+, with groups like Maps and Android taking over responsibility for products that he oversaw centrally. Photos, in particular, might move over to the Android organization run by Sundar Pichai, to get more closely integrated into the same group that designs camera software.

According to our source, friction with the influential engineers who form a parallel power structure within Google may have contributed to Gundotra's departure. When other members of the "L team" left their roles, like former Local chief Jeff Huber and former YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, they found new jobs within Google. The fact that Gundotra is leaving the company altogether suggests his exit was less friendly than theirs.

Facebook is going virtual in about the biggest way possible. The social network will acquire virtual reality-hardware maker Oculus, creator of the acclaimed Oculus Rift headset, for roughly $2 billion. The deal apparently represents Mark Zuckerberg's gamble on a technology he believes may one day supplant today's mobile devices.

Last month, Facebook threw down a whopping $19 billion to acquire international mobile messaging service WhatsApp. The social behemoth obviously isn't shy about big acquisitions, especially defensive ones to neutralize fast-growing threats.

For better or worse, the future of virtual reality itself and that of the world's biggest social network are now surprisingly, inextricably entwined. According to Zuckerberg, virtual reality really is what's next—we just didn't realize how closely he was paying attention.

“Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow," Zuckerberg said. "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate.”

What Oculus Hath Wrought

The Oculus Rift, which has garnered nearly universally ecstatic early reviews based on demonstrations (like, for instance, this one), isn't yet for sale in a consumer release. Oculus hasn't announced when it might release the headset to the general public nor what it might cost, although last week it opened pre-orders for version two of the Oculus developer's kit at $350 a pop.

Still, Facebook's decision to pounce on Oculus remains puzzling, to put it lightly. Put less lightly, for Oculus and VR enthusiasts, the feeling falls somewhere between unsettling and downright heartbreaking.

Such as, for instance, the indie gaming deity and Minecraft founder known as Notch:

For Oculus, the move could be a quick exit from the threat of Sony, which announced its own polished Oculus Rift competitor for the PlayStation 4 last week. For Facebook, imagining a near-future in which instead of idling "liking" one another's virtual minutiae, we're actually fully, virtually present—360 degrees of present—well, that's something we'll have to wrap our heads around.

Facebook would always rather you share more, not less, on the social network. Its latest tweak now puts your friends to work to cajole you to part with personal information you may not have wanted to put out there.

Users who have not disclosed their phone numbers, home addresses or personal emails on their Facebook profiles will start getting notifications from friends who want to know more.

In 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people."

He added, "We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are."

This latest change, however, seems more like an attempt to alter users' behavior than to cater to it.

Share And Share Alike

Previously, any information that wasn't shared on a person’s profile simply wasn’t listed. The prompt to share is new, Facebook confirmed to ReadWrite, a change that's been slowly rolling out since late last year but "ramping up” recently.

“This feature provides an easy way for friends to ask you for information that’s not already in your profile,” a Facebook spokesperson told ReadWrite in an email. “For example, a friend could ask you where you work, or for your email address.”

When you get the request, you'll get a prompt to share the information with the friend who requested it—or add it to your profile for all your friends to see.

It’s long been possible to adjust your settings to show your personal contact details to the public, friends, or no one, but those involve complicated privacy settings that most users avoid.

ReadWrite editor-in-chief Owen Thomas first encountered the new setting when he was looking for a friend’s email. What he saw was a link on her profile that said “Ask for [friend’s] email address.”

Curious, we then visited my profile, one that I’ve carefully crafted to show as little personal information as possible. We saw similar links, such as “Ask for Selena’s address.”

Facebook’s latest attempt to get you to share as much personal information is clever. In the past, Facebook has prompted users to fill out their work or school information—but the request came from Facebook itself, an impersonal approach that may have proven ineffective.

When Thomas asked for my address, I was prompted to fill out the location information, then choose whether to share with just him, or all my friends. While I might not mind my editor knowing where I live, the other 411 people I have as friends on Facebook—some I consider only mild acquaintances—I’d rather not know my location. And it requires only a simple inattentive click to share that with all of them. Reversing the decision requires a hunt through privacy settings.

A Very Quiet Change

The change is subtle. Facebook can argue that it's just making it easier to ask friends for their contact information. It’s common for people to send a Facebook message asking for a friend’s email address, for example.

And Facebook is competing with a host of social startups, like Snapchat, that rely on the address books in users’ phones to match them up, vitiating Facebook's advantage in having an authoritative list of users’ friends

As far as we can tell, with this new feature, Facebook is not changing its privacy policy or users' settings. (Last year the company finally killed a privacy setting that kept people from searching users by their name, and people were understandably irked.) But it is introducing a function that may change people's behavior, with unintended and risky consequences.

I received no notification letting me know friends could now request my phone number or address. The request just showed up.

Here's why that’s a problem: To put it plainly, Facebook is using your friends to guilt you into sharing contact information on the social network.

There is no way to prevent friends from requesting your information. According to the Facebook spokesperson, only people you're friends with can ask for your information, and they are required to say why they want it.

This feature may help cut down on messages bugging you for contact information. It might even help users who didn’t realize they could efficiently share their phone number or email address with their Facebook friends.

But Facebook should notify users that it's coming, and create a setting that lets people opt out. That's better than turning our profiles into one long list of fill-in-the-blanks.

ReadWritePredict is a look ahead at the technology trends and companies that will shape the coming year.

Not long ago, most people had written off Foursquare as a has-been, the Mayor of Debt Town, saddled by a $41 million loan from Silver Lake and its current investors. The check-in service it offered was no longer a hot trend, and its prospects for revenues looked weak after reports surfaced that it had only done $2 million in business in 2012.

Now Foursquare has done something unexpected: It has not just survived but seemingly thrived. The company just raised $35 million in fresh cash, wiping some of that debt off its books. Its revenues are growing quickly. And its usage is expanding around the world, in surprising places like Beijing and Istanbul—wherever there is a mess of urbanity to be mapped.

Perhaps most importantly, Foursquare has become the favorite way for mobile-app developers to add location as a feature. Everyone from Uber to Pinterest and WhatsApp uses Foursquare’s directory of places.

The Foursquare Bidding War

So who ends up with this prize?

Don’t get me wrong—part of me, after seeing founder and CEO Dennis Crowley’s stubborn struggle to realize his vision, would applaud an independent Foursquare. But it's hard to see how the company gets to public-company scale. Crowley may want to soldier on, but his troops are getting tired—like longtime collaborator Alex Rainert, who recently stepped down as Foursquare's product chief.

Foursquare's growing advertising revenues have bought Crowley time. But ultimately, the value of Foursquare may lie in its appeal to app developers. And first and foremost among them is an app called Instagram.

Facebook, of course, bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. True to his word, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not interfered with Instagram, letting founder Kevin Systrom run it independently. The fact that Instagram still uses Foursquare's database of places, not Facebook's, is a telling example of that.

That seems like a dangerous dependency. Instagram has far outgrown Foursquare—it has 150 million monthly active users, while Foursquare, which does not give numbers for its active users, says 45 million users have registered with the service.

But Foursquare may have the upper hand. It is uniquely hard to replace. While Google, Yelp, Yext, and Facebook have directories of businesses, few services match Foursquare for its collection of quirky, noncommercial points of interest. Those are naturally the kind of places Instagram users like to document.

And Facebook has not given up on weaving place information into its social network. When he unveiled Facebook's first attempt at matching Foursquare, Facebook Places, product chief Chris Cox described it as a way to create “collective memory." Facebook may not have nailed that idea, but when you look at a collection of Instagram photos tagged to a Foursquare location, you see Cox's vision realized.

Future Forward

So imagine this scenario: Google or Microsoft or Apple, eager to bolster their mapping services, will inevitably bid for Foursquare in 2014. Or perhaps PayPal, eager to chart anywhere you can spend money, may make a move. That may well force Facebook's hand.

Foursquare’s real-time recommendations paint a powerful picture of the future.

As part of Facebook, Foursquare will have far more value than just a directory of points on a map. It will be part of a growing suite of services Facebook offers to mobile-app developers, from Facebook’s own login and friends list, to the back-end services offered by Parse, and the distribution Facebook offers through the News Feed and App Center.

It could also launch Facebook into new areas of business. Already, Foursquare's real-time recommendations for where to go next offer glimmers of anticipatory computing—a form of artificial intelligence where computers smartly take into account a variety of external inputs to mimic human decision-making.

Facebook is currently designed around the act of remembering. It anticipates only what you might want to read from what your friends have already posted. That’s so over. Its Timeline profile pages are built for nostalgia. This might be why teens are growing bored with Facebook, even as adults warm up to it: It’s about the past, not the future.

So picture Foursquare's anticipatory algorithms applied more broadly to Facebook—to music, movies, news articles, even people. It's kind of scary to imagine Mark Zuckerberg, who already knows what we've done with our lives, telling us what to do next. With Crowley's help, though, he might just have the chance to do it.

Google has patented plans for software that learns how you behave on social networks and can automatically generate suggestions for "personalized" reactions to tweets and Facebook posts.

Originally noted by the BBC, the ostensible goal of the software is to help users keep up and reply to all the interactions they receive, especially critical ones. However, technology like this could be counterproductive; the whole point of social media is to, well, be social, after all.

This is a post in the ReadWriteHome series, which explores the implications of living in connected homes.

It’s inevitable; your connected home will collect data about you.

Your smart fridge will know whether you’re a vegetarian, or if you regularly drink alcohol. Lighting and thermostat automation can determine your daily schedule, including when you’re home or away. Your Xbox will know what shows you watch and even keep tabs on your fitness and health.

All this data makes companies—and possibly the government—salivate.

Think about all you share online, and take that to another, more intimate level. What does Facebook do with all your data now? The social network uses it to send you personalized advertising, and its Graph Search lets strangers find out information you thought was private. Now imagine all your connected appliances doing the same.

Though it might be a freaky thought at first, what it really boils down to is whether or not manufacturers will be transparent enough to admit what data they are collecting, and how they are storing or using it. And as consumers, it’s our job to demand transparency.

“We’re still at a very early stage in consumer awareness of the privacy and security problem in the Internet age,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Consumers have a very poor understanding of where their data goes.”

So how can connected home device manufacturers make sure they don’t make the same mistakes as their Internet predecessors? We’re taking a look at five ways social networks have managed data and user privacy, and what the connected home can learn from these approaches.

1. Don’t Confuse Users About Privacy Settings

When Facebook eliminated a key privacy feature last month, people weren’t happy. Users finally lost the ability to prevent others from searching them by name. Facebook claimed it was a move to improve Graph Search, but many users, myself included, felt like it took away something that made them feel protected.

The feature elimination prompted increased scrutiny on users’ privacy settings, and while Facebook is seemingly straightforward regarding why and how you can share your personal information, it can sometimes be confusing.

Take Graph Search. The natural-language search tool Facebook released in July lets users search for people by more than just a name, for instance, “Women Who Live in San Francisco and Like The Giants.” As you can imagine, the search casts a wide net.

Unfortunately, if you’re unfamiliar with the tool, the results you appear in can be surprising.

When the ABC news affiliate in the Bay Area asked people to view their profiles as a stranger using Graph Search, they were shocked. Dena Shapiro, a teacher, was alarmed that some photos of her holding a glass of wine were visible to the public. She was concerned that her students or their parents would be able to view the photos, something she thought wouldn’t be appropriate given her profession.

Don’t get me wrong; Graph Search can also be a helpful tool. When traveling somewhere, it’s nice to be able to search “Friends Who Live In Los Angeles.” But with any tool, if you don’t know how it works, it could do more harm than good.

That’s something connected home manufacturers need to take into consideration. Home controls must be easy to understand and operate, and it should be obvious what, if anything, they are doing with our data.

2. Be Clear About Targeted Advertising

Social media has been experimenting with targeted advertising based on personal data for years, and not without hiccups. Perhaps the most well-known social ad fail was Facebook’s huge misjudgment about its users’ desire for “sponsored stories,” to appear in news feeds.

In 2011, Facebook rolled out Sponsored Stories, or advertisements that featured users’ pictures or Likes as a way to encourage friends to buy things. Between January 2011 and August 2012, the company generated $234 million in revenue with the Sponsored Stories product.

People didn’t appreciate their likeness being used in advertising. The social network ended up taking a $20 million hit that led to the restructuring of its privacy policies to better inform users of how and why information is used in ads.

Now Facebook is much more transparent about how it determines which ads grace our timelines, and how they use personal data.

When businesses start slipping advertising into products and services in the connected home, they will have to be clear exactly what information they are collecting, and why people might find it useful. Additionally, like Facebook, users will need the ability to opt-out of targeted advertising, or having their information used to push products.

Yes, I want my fridge to tell me there’s a sale on milk at the grocery store when I run out, but I don’t want it to come as a surprise.

Users understand advertising is inevitable; it’s a part of being on the Internet. But being able to control what they are seeing, and how their data is used is crucial to the success of in-home advertising.

3. Be Wary Of Intrusive Ads

The visual web is quickly becoming the darling of social media. Sites like Pinterest and Instagram attract huge user numbers with their image-based content, and have recently slipped advertising into photo streams.

What will make advertising successful on Pinterest and Instagram is that ads don’t actually look like ads.

The crux of Pinterest’s move to begin promoting posts was that pins will be “tasteful,” “transparent,” “relevant” and influenced by users’ own feedback, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said earlier this year.

"Our aim is to make any advertisements you see feel as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos many of you already enjoy from your favorite brands," the company said in a blog post.

If and when advertisements start appearing in my home, I want them to be not only useful, but also fit seamlessly into the personal environment I’ve already created.

4. Be Responsive To Threats

There is bound to be spam in the connected home, and not the Spam in your pantry.

With any connected device or service, users run the risk of being sent unwanted links or viruses. We don’t know what the connected home’s version of the Nigerian email scam will be, but we do know that in our homes, our place of refuge, it’s critical to be cognizant of our digital safety.

So it’s important for providers to be responsive to potential threats.

Twitter’s response to an onslaught spam was to simply stop allowing users to privately send links. Although the majority of us were sending safe links, Twitter realized it had a problem with spam accounts sending unsafe links that compromised user accounts when the links were clicked.

Instead of providing different solutions to potentially quell the problem, it just stopped it altogether.

Although blocking links is inconvenient, Twitter’s direct responsiveness to a perceived threat was necessary to protect users.

And that’s exactly the kind of cautious behavior we want in the connected home. Before my thermostat can turn on me, I want companies to be confident turning it off.

5. Tell Me Where You Store My Data

Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging service that has garnered popularity for its “disappearing” messages, caught some flack earlier this year because its messages, well, don’t disappear.

The allure of Snapchat is that you can send temporary messages to your friends, sharing a fleeting moment that eventually vanishes—except it was revealed in May that the app doesn’t actually delete the files.

Of course this news justifiably frustrated users who were happily sending inappropriate pictures to their friends thinking they would simply self-destruct.

Snapchat quickly responded to those accusations, and has since had to continually remind users that the company can retrieve unopened snaps, going so far as to admit that like any communications provider, Snapchat has received law enforcement requests for snaps.

Although the company has since come forward about the confusion, it should have been very clear at the service’s conception that the ephemerality is in impression only.

There aren’t any Snapchat-like services in the connected home—yet. And because we’ve experienced this already on our mobile devices, users could be more skeptical about apps or services claiming to make data disappear.

So let this be a lesson for the connected home of the future: be transparent with users, and don’t claim to be something you’re not.

The Connected Home Invasion

Not all connected home invasions will come in the form of a hack. While it’s terrifying to think someone could take control of our living rooms remotely—and it’s a reality both in theory and in practice—what businesses or the government can glean simply by lurking and parsing through our data can have consequences we might not yet realize.

To combat intrusive and inexplicable data collection, users and companies need to take what we’ve already learned about social media privacy and apply it to the home of the future.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg addressed a packed room at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, saying that his company wants to start using social tools to connect in different ways.

While the social network has 1.15 billion active users, Zuckerberg increasingly hopes that developers will build more ways to tie those users together.

"We want to focus on doing a few of the core things and enable other companies to build great social apps," he said.

That stands in contrast to some of Facebook's recent moves to imitate popular apps—for example, how it built Facebook Camera even as it was in the process of acquiring Instagram, and launched Poke, an ill-fated clone of Snapchat, a service that sends disappearing photo and video messages.

"The full vision over time was that we could help applications by enabling login, importing friends, and distribution," he said.

A Platform Shift

Historically, "Facebook apps" have meant social apps running on Facebook's website, like Zynga's once-popular, now-fading Web-based games. Distribution was the main part of its appeal.

Now, Facebook wants developers to work Facebook into multiple tiers of the application-development process. To that end, it recently acquired Parse, which operates some of the back-end services mobile-app developers need.

Last week, Zuckerberg addressed a crowd at Parse's developer conference, harping on the importance of developers using Facebook's services when building apps. His talk today made it even clearer that the company wants to be in as many applications as possible, making Facebook the platform upon which all applications are created.

These apps might use Facebook as a log-in service, or to populate accounts with personal data, or to import lists of friends—or simply as a computing back end.

The Mobile Push

At the same time, Facebook's own mobile apps have gone through a major overhaul.

At this time last year, Facebook had no revenue from its own mobile apps. That has changed following the introduction of popular new mobile ad products: In recent earnings reports, Facebook has said that almost 40 percent of Facebook's revenue is on mobile. Zuckerberg also mentioned that people spend one-fifth of their total time on mobile devices using Facebook. A close second: Facebook-owned Instagram.

The one major disappointment has been Facebook Home, an app which heavily modifies the user interface on Android smartphones. (It's not available on Apple smartphones, because Apple's operating system is less open to such customization.)

Home has limited availability on various models of Android phones, though, and users rejected aspects of its design.

Zuckerberg suggested Facebook hadn't given up on Home yet.

"It's a tough thing determining when something doesn't work, and when something hasn't worked yet," he said.

He said that the best features from Facebook Home were implemented into the mobile application, like Chat Heads.

Zuckerberg said users liked the Cover Feed feature which displays photos and posts Home displayed on their phone's home screens, and that Facebook is considering incorporating with other social applications like Instagram.

That would make Home less of a Facebook app, and more of a platform for other developers' social software—and as with other services Facebook is building, putting third-party developers first may well be the way that Facebook finds success.

At a tech conference in San Francisco Monday, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner dropped tantalizing hints about the future direction of his company.

He dismissed the notion that the professional network, once known primarily as a site for recruiters and jobseekers, would challenge Microsoft and Salesforce head-on in the market for collaboration tools.

Weiner did say, though, that LinkedIn would show "a greater emphasis on professional identity" and noted that his company is "building tools that let us"—LinkedIn's own employees—"get more value from our own platform."

A Détente With Microsoft And Salesforce

Today, LinkedIn is designed for public sharing, and the network has grown enormously by emphasizing the sharing of work-related content.

But Weiner has been talking about the potential for LinkedIn to build tools for internal collaboration since at least 2011. Last year, he revealed that LinkedIn had built such tools—broadly similar to Microsoft's Yammer or Salesforce's Chatter, from the way he described them—for its own employees' use.

So let's assume those tools will be slow to come—or may simply be armaments held in reserve, to keep Microsoft and Salesforce from trying to venture onto LinkedIn's turf of public professional identity. (It's easy to imagine parts of a workforce's Yammer or Chatter activity getting intentionally published to users outside a company, and thus becoming public representations of an employee's work persona, in competition with LinkedIn's profiles.)

A Security Badge For The Web

Barring that, what could LinkedIn do?

As Weiner said at Disrupt, LinkedIn already has the pieces he's describing. The technological piece that carries LinkedIn's professional identities across the Internet is a product called Sign In With LinkedIn. Not unlike Facebook Login, this piece of software lets users sign in with a LinkedIn account, rather than create a new account for every website that comes along.

While far less visible than Facebook or Google's identity efforts, Sign In With LinkedIn has been gaining traction, particularly with recruiting sites, where it's a natural fit, and business-to-business sites. More mainstream media sites like Business Insider have also included it in their login options.

But it would be far more interesting if LinkedIn started courting the burgeoning sector of Web-based productivity tools.

That doesn't match the new world of work. As Weiner noted, "Jobs are increasingly fragmented." Some are full-time, some are part-time, some are contract or freelance work. LinkedIn, which maps professional connections inside and outside the walls of a company, could be particularly well suited for authenticating workers in this post-Coase-ian world.

A Host Of Apps For A New World Of Work

It's not even necessary for LinkedIn to build these apps itself. It could simply be the identity layer that undergirds them. For private sharing, it could identify users—badge them in, as it were, to the virtual buildings where most work happens these days. For public sharing, it could pipe relevant updates to LinkedIn users' feeds, as apps do on Facebook and Twitter.

To be clear, these are the merest hints we've gleaned from Weiner's comments at Disrupt and over the years. But it's clear that he's thinking about what to do with the enormous asset of some 250 million members' professional identities. The biggest opportunity isn't in LinkedIn's app. It's in an army of LinkedIn apps.

In the past, our personal and professional relationships were separated by office walls. Now, through the widespread adoption of social media, they aren't.

Today, the relationship between employees and their managers has become more complicated because everyone is online, communicating all of the time. All workers have to consider their social-network relationships as they develop their careers and network at the office. If you don't accept your coworker's friend request they may take offense and you might burn bridges with them. If your profile is private, you might be perceived as hiding something from the people you work with. If you share an explicit picture on your Facebook wall and your manager sees it, that could hurt your credibility at work, even though you think it shouldn't.

Millennials Rising

In a new study in partnership with American Express, we found that millennial employees—those who reached young adulthood around the turn of the millennium—are more comfortable being friends with managers on social and professional networks than their managers are.

When it comes to Facebook, only 14% of managers and 24% of employees are either very comfortable or extremely comfortable being friends with each other. As for LinkedIn, 32% of employees and 24% of their managers are either very comfortable or extremely comfortable being connected.

There is a generational gap when it comes to the workplace. Gen X and Boomers are more hesitant to be connected to younger workers. They don't want to interfere in their colleagues' personal lives and they are more private in their own life, resisting the temptation of posting everything online.

Some managers are more inclined to connect with their employees on LinkedIn over Facebook. LinkedIn is still viewed as a professional network, while Facebook is seen as a social one.

"For me, Facebook, is for my friends and family so I am pretty selective with who is a part of that social network," says Mike Proulx, senior vice president of digital strategy at Hill Holliday.

Changing Profiles

Naturally, people will be more open and share more personal parts of their lives if they have reservations about who they accept as a friend online. While you may choose to make your profile private and only accept family and friends, that could change over time.

We did a study last year of four million Facebook profiles and found that the average millennial has nearly 700 regular friends and 16 coworker friends. As the strength of your relationships change over time and people change jobs, you're likely to end up connected to a coworker at some point in your career.

While Proulx is more reserved, other managers are more open and encourage social network connections with employees. Scott Gulbransen, director of social business strategy at H&R Block, views coworker connections as a great way to develop stronger relationships with employees.

"Even though we may have different views and interests, it allows them to see more of the human side of their boss—that's a good thing," says Gulbransen.

When you have insight into your manager's social life, you might be able to bridge new connections and start new conversations that you wouldn't have brought up in the past. They can also learn more about you, your interests and how you live your life.

A lot of managers that I speak to are open to online connections if there's trust between both parties. If there's enough trust, people won't judge each other as harshly and are more comfortable with opening up.

"If the employee and I are genuinely friends and want to have this connection on a social platform then I don’t have an issue with it," says Steve Fogarty, senior manager of strategic programs at Adidas.

Employees should strive to be friends with their managers because managers hold the keys to unlock new opportunities and have the power to promote.

While some managers and employees are trying to separate both their personal and professional lives now, the future is open so we won't be able to live two different lives—they will be one and the same. By being smart about what you post online and how you present yourself today, you will be set up for future success.5

For two years, Facebook has allowed users to implement a more secure connection to the site. But it hasn't been the default for all users until today, when Facebook announced that it would move all of its 1 billion-plus users to Web browsing using HTTP Secure, or HTTPS. HTTPS is a more secure connection between browsers and the Web servers companies like Facebook run.

In a statement made today on its website, Facebook reported that all traffic to www.facebook.com, the version of its site used by most desktop PCs, and 80% of traffic going to m.facebook.com, its mobile website, will be secure. The social media giant says that it's not as simple as adding an "s" to the end of "http," in its Web address. It outlined in-depth steps it had to undertake for the migration, and planned improvements for the fall.

Change is scary, and as an Instagram devotee, I obviously hate it. (Aren't you still reeling from the Vinestagram update?) But change is what's around the corner Instagram fans—change spelled A-D-S. Mark Zuckerberg says so.

Brace yourself.

We Get It—Instagram Is A Business

As of July, Facebook well is on track with its milestones. It poured money into mobile in late 2012, rolled out its so-called new "pillar," Graph Search, and revenue is up 53% from this time last year. The company and its gaping social maw should be content for now, right? Well, yes and no.

On Facebook's July earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't mince words: "Kevin [Systrom, Instagram Founder] has always been clear that we're building Instagram to be a business. And that we expect that over time we're going to generate a lot of profit from it … probably through advertising."

Facebook knows Instagram is valuable—$1 billion valuable, though that included some expensive defense, making it not just a cool acquisition—and intends for it to make money.

The good news? It might be a while. Facebook made an impressive 41% of its revenue this quarter from mobile ads, which finally are implemented and working as intended. The bad news? Facebook made 41% of its revenue this quarter from mobile ads—and they're working as intended, with new revenue streams bubbling up green.

Facebook Thinks Instagram Needs To Grow Up

Sure, Instagram looks like a ripe little mobile revenue opportunity, but right now the photo sharing app is small potatoes. Just ask Zuckerberg: "There are so many directions to expand this in.… We think that the right focus for now is to continue to focus on increasing the footprint for Instagram." (Phew.)

Instagram's 130 million monthly active users are a drop in the gigantic Facebook bucket. Facebook has 819 million monthly-active mobile users. The big kahuna of social networks weighs in around 1.1 billion users, bringing regular ol' web use into the mix. Instagram, by comparison, is teensy, though mobile traction shows no signs of slowing down. Anywhere.

Dear Instagram Ad Designers: Good Luck With That

Instagram is beloved and full of cats and memories. Its users are sensitive, myself included. Considering that most of us have caught on by now to the at times bizarre or wholly irrelevant ads creeping into our Facebook News Feeds, Instagram ads are going to have to be slick.

Designing those ads will take time (hopefully a lot!) and brainpower. Think about it. On the Instagram app (the Web viewer is just a utility, really) you see one photo at time, and since you can follow and unfollow freely, unlike cluttered Facebook, 100% of the content is relevant. For users, alarm bells go off easily, and that's mostly because the photo sharing app is just so good the way it stands now. (Except for the videos. Grumble, grumble, grumble.)

Turning on the money spigot at Instagram now and riling the vocal, selfie-loving masses is just plain unnecessary. Until Instagram grows up, that is. "When the right time comes, we'll think about doing advertising as well," Zuckerberg said. "And I think that's going to be a really big opportunity."

Google+, Google’s social network, turns 2 today. And like a toddler, it’s starting to find its footing after a lot of crawling around and wailing.

ReadWrite was the first outlet to report on Google+, creating a lot of anticipation for Google's take on social networking. Like many people in the technology world, I signed up for Google+ as soon as I could after the June 28, 2011 announcement.

What Google Got Wrong At The Get-Go

The first was that the Picasa Web albums associated with the Gmail identity that I used to join Google+ immediately turned into Google+ albums. At the time I found the change made sharing my photos a little more difficult.

Ghost Town+?

My next problem was that I found few friends jumped on the Google+ bandwagon.

I did not give up on Google+, but I will admit putting most of my energy into my own blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.

Two years later, though, Google+ and I seem to be finding new reasons to like each other.

Apparently I am not alone. Google+ is, by some counts, now the second-largest social platform with an estimated 343 million users. Facebook has 693 million users and Twitter is in third spot with 288 million users.

There are serious questions about how Google counts users of Google+, but we’ll leave those aside: It’s clear Google has gotten at least some of the people who use its other services to embrace the social aspects of those services powered by Google+.

Tools For Sharing

Being active on all three platforms, as well as Tumblr, gives me a good perspective. I also manage Google+ and Facebook pages for a couple of organizations. Of course, I also use all the platforms, as well as my websites, to promote the books that I write.

While I have more friends on Facebook and more people following me on Twitter, I find the interactions that I have on Google+ are more likely to result in a conversation with someone who can help me with my business objectives.

Like many people, I have a lot of old grade-school and high-school friends on Facebook. I enjoy communicating with them, but it’s often about trivial stuff and rarely does much for my business goals.

There are some basic things that I like about Google+ that are hard to find in other social platforms.

The first and most basic of all is that I can edit my posts. As a writer, I strive for accuracy. It drives me crazy when I see a spelling or content error in a Facebook post or a Tweet. Facebook is still testing editing options. On Twitter, the only way that I can fix a tweet is to delete and start over. Google+ lets me edit what I have written, just like an intelligent Web app should do.

Second, I find Circles a much better way at directing my content to the proper people. I'm not alone in liking Circles. And Google+ is designed around them: Google prompts you to use them when you sign up, so you end up organized from the start.

You can mention a couple of people in a Facebook post, but if you do content like me which spans the spectrum from travel to technology, the circles in Google+ work much better for targeting content. I have never taken to Twitter’s lists—they’re hard to use, and Twitter’s support for them seems to have waned—so I don’t know how they compare.

Picture Perfect

When it comes to pictures, I now find the enhanced Google+ a much better way to share pictures than Facebook, Flickr, or even Google’s own Picasa. I have a college friend with whom I often share bird and landscape pictures. In fact, he and I both use Google+ to share items. Sharing with Google+ between us has replaced emailing with attachments.

On Facebook or Twitter, there are items that I will not share because I have learned that politics can cause problems, especially on Facebook. Being a liberal in a very red state, I have a circle of friends on Google+ who agree with me politically. It is easy to share a sensitive article with them on Google+ and avoid the negative feedback.

Community Feel

Perhaps the most exciting thing for me is how easy it is to set up an effective, nice-looking community on Google+. Creating a nice community on Google+ is far easier than on Facebook. There are no annoying notices that I need X number of likes before I can move to the next level. It is also easier to manage and to target specific information to people in the community.

Facebook Pages for organizations or businesses seem to take a second seat to individual users when it comes to new features like adding multiple pictures. By contrast, Google+ seems to give community pages all the goodies.

I am just starting to experiment with Google+ Hangouts so I cannot provide much perspective there, but I can tell you that Google+ is going to get a larger share of my focus in the coming year—especially now that Google+ has rolled all of its chat services together under the Hangouts name.

The Other Social Network?

If the next two years bring as much progress, Google+ might end up challenging Facebook. Certainly I think Google+ has gotten well beyond the earlier worries that it would not survive. I hope Google keeps bringing improvements to Google+. They have my attention now.

What will make Instagram successful in video isn't some specific product. Rather, it's the way Instagram videos play well on Facebook. And I mean "play well" both literally and figuratively.

The Featured Presentation

Everyone's comparing Instagram to Twitter's Vine app. Both allow users to take short video clips. And so it's easy to tick off a list of explicit product features—max video length, stabilization, filters, and so on—without considering which ones people will really use.

A video of Ramona the Love Terrier, as she appears on Facebook.

I've long argued that what made Instagram special was not its photo filters, but the ease and speed of sharing.

Ease And Speed

One reason brands flocked to Instagram early on, even though there wasn't (and still isn't) any way to advertise on Instagram, was that Instagram made it easy for them to post photos to Facebook pages.

And when Instagram launched, it was a better way to share photos on Facebook than Facebook's own mobile app—with one disadvantage, which is that photos appeared as small thumbnails.

"That was huge for us," Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told me at Thursday's launch event for Instagram video at Facebook headquarters. In a matter of months, Instagram's user base ballooned to 30 million users—and Facebook announced it would buy Instagram for a billion dollars.

At the event, Systrom also confirmed to me that videos would post to Facebook in the same direct manner.

Sources And Sinks Of Video

Twitter's Vine can technically post to Facebook, but it's limited to a link and a thumbnail—a weaker level of integration that means users must click through to watch a video.

And here's how a Vine video of Ramona appears on Facebook.

On Twitter, it's the opposite situation: Vine videos play automatically within tweets, while Instagram videos, like Instagram photos, appear only as a link which users must click.

This state of affairs is vaguely annoying for users, who must choose whether their friends on Twitter or Facebook (or just Vine and Instagram, which are specialized social networks in their own rights) see a given video.

But for brands seeking to maximize the reach of marketing materials they create, it's maddening. Do they make a Vine video or an Instagram? If they have to pick one, it will probably be Instagram, with its 130 million users and hooks into Facebook's billion-user audience—not to mention the advertising-friendly 15-second length.

This is just part of a larger battle Twitter and Facebook are fighting to become the ultimate sink—the collecting point, the final destination—of all forms of expression on the Web, from textual status updates to photos, videos, and links.

You've Got A Lot Of Work To Do, So I'm Going To Let You Get To It

Instagram is far from done. Systrom confessed to me that he hadn't gotten a chance to test the integration with Facebook Pages before launch. When we tested it, we discovered Instagram videos wouldn't play natively within Facebook's mobile app. Instead, they launch the Instagram app and play there.

That's something Systrom's colleagues will likely have to resolve with an update to Facebook's mobile app. (On the website, as promised, Instagram videos play on user profiles, brand pages, and the News Feed.)

Twitter also has an interesting distribution opportunity that Instagram lacks—the open Web. Like YouTube videos, you can embed Vine videos on any Web page. You can't do that with Instagram—at least not without some elaborate workarounds that aren't supported by Facebook and could break at any time. For marketers eager to reuse videos they take for Vine on other websites, that could be a selling point.

The end game here is to fill our social spheres with short, easy-to-consume, enjoyable video—and then unobtrusively slip in some video ads into the stream.

For Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and Vine don't have to be ad platforms in their own right. All they have to do is lower the barriers to sharing video. That's the one feature that really matters—and so every little detail of how moments turn into moving images is crucial for their success.

The most ephermeral social platform of all, Twitter is designed for real-time conversation - and if you miss the joke, the moment or the meme, well, you miss the boat. That's where Vizify has been helping out. Today the company, in partnership with Twitter, introduced a fun little tool for making a "greatest hits" reel from your Twitter account, curating popular photos, Vine videos, topics, followers and tweets, of course. Like, say, this:

A very cool little data visualization startup based in Portland, OR, Vizify partnered with Twitter back in December to sculpt the company's unruly hoard of trend data and hashtags into a big year-end retrospective and user-specific ones, just for fun. When I spoke to Vizify's CEO and co-founder about last year's Twitter data viz undertaking, he explained the complementary relationship between the two companies:

It's Twitter, so they're the global conversation. And what's sort of interesting to us... is that they have that whole in-the-moment, rapid-fire, what's-happening-now thing nailed down... and yet when you step back from it and draw a picture of it over a longer period of time it becomes a really powerful tool for self-reflection. Unlike reading someone's stream, this is just a really accessible, playful, fun way to get a quick a feel for what someone's all about.

In a search for meaning likely not unfamiliar to any tweet-addicted user, Twitter as a company seems interested in connecting all its micro-moments into larger arcs too. Starting with its Twitter Stories project, the company began to dig into some of its 140-character missives to uncover the deeper tales underneath.

Interested in uncovering your own (not-so) secret history? Check out the #Vizify hashtag or fire up your own - just be sure to pick the right soundtrack. We did.

Dirk Dallas, a graphic designer currently residing in southern California, downloaded the photo-sharing and -filtering app Instagram the day it came out on October 6, 2010. He then promptly deleted it.

“It didn't make sense because unless you follow people or have followers, what is it?” the 30-year-old university professor says of his early mindset. Flash forward two and a half years, after a friend told Dallas to give the app another try, and he has 106,000 followers under the handle @dirka.

And Instagram itself has changed, becoming part of Facebook through a billion-dollar acquisition.

For users like Dallas, Instagram is a verb, and a well-paying one. For Dallas, one recent gig involved Toyota, who paid him to participate in an Instagram-oriented photo shoot. He’s been approached numerous other times, and turned down some of the offers.

“I’ve had to walk a fine line of, ‘Wow I’m really selling out,’ or, ‘I’m pulling a fast one on my followers,’” he explains.

And Dallas is not alone. He represents a sliver of the app’s 100 million users who are not professional photographers, photojournalists, or celebrities, yet have amassed a massive following through their keen eye and commitment to the community. To put it in perspective, Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger has only 65,000 more followers than Dallas. (Celebrities attract considerably more: LeBron James has 2.5 million).

But while it sounds like a dream come true—using a smartphone app to launch an Internet-based career on the side—Dallas has battled a common enemy in many heavy Instagram users’ paths: himself.

“I used to be kind of obsessed in a negative way," he admits. "Instagram kind of consumed me."

Before he had over 100,000 followers and before his Instagram presence became a revenue stream, he struggled with an issue at the very core of the photo-sharing app: the way it has latched onto its users and assimilated itself into our daily lives, for better and for worse.

"Instagram kind of consumed me."

With Facebook's backing, Instagram is here to stay, and the effects of its pressure to scan for, snap, and constantly think about shareable moments day in and day out is central to the way our digital existences bleed into our physical experiences.

"Instagram Is Not A Photography Company"

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in a sit-down with Kevin Rose, of Google Ventures and Digg, at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, CA in May.

When Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, a clean-cut towering Stanford grad, addressed a crowd at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in May, he reiterated multiple times that the company he cofounded “is not a photography company.”

“Instagram is a communications company," Systrom said. "It’s about communicating a moment. It just so happens that that message happens to be an image."

His insistence of this point throughout the night’s Q&A conversation, moderated by Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose, bordered on the evangelical. Systrom showed an almost Steve Jobs-like marketing magic. He spoke as if the crowd needed convincing that Instagram was worth the $1 billion Facebook paid for it last April. They didn’t.

Instagram has no real competitors. Sure, there’s Hipstamatic and Flickr’s smartphone app and Twitter’s mobile photo-filter options, but none of these will ever come close to commanding Instagram's near-synonymous identity with photo sharing in the minds of its users.

Projecteo, an Instagram projector that, for $34.99, can show off 10 of your shots on 35 mm slide, secured $87,000 in Kickstarter funding last year.

As Systrom said himself that night, “Anyone can make a filter app.” What Instagram did was different. It dug into our souls, and it’s part of our daily digital ecosystem on a private and personal level comparable only to Facebook, not coincidentally.

Part of its success was in the way Instagram took the hurdles of photography out of photo sharing.

For one, you can’t make an image horizontal or vertical; all photos are square. (Apple appears to be following Instagram's lead—a split-second preview of the next version of the iPhone operating system showed a square-photo mode.)

Within less than a minute, your photo is telegraphed to the world. With Instagram, photography became more than just easy. It became natural.

“I shared something, my photo got a bit of action, and it was awesome,” Dallas explains of the first photo he took after he re-downloaded the app a few months after deleting it on its launch day. “I got instant feedback."

It turned out some of his friends and Twitter followers had stumbled onto his account while the app remained off his phone. While he'd temporarily abandoned Instagram, it hadn't forgotten him—and that gave him a small following to come back to.

The feedback is the key to Instagram’s success and growth. It’s the reason communities with thousands of people spring up around hashtags in mere hours. But it’s also the source of the now-too-familiar narcissistic tendencies—that need to show everyone what you’re about to eat for lunch, for instance, and the negativity that comes with that.

Instagram is now yet another pillar of society’s continuously strained and conflicted relationship with social networks. For the photo-sharing app, the dangers lurk deeper than with Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr because with Instagram, our very experiences are our digital currency.

The devaluation of daily life to a struggle for likes and exposure and reaffirmation can force us to reconsider and reflect upon the reasons we love Instagram so much—or why, love it or hate it, we can't quit it.

The Conflicted Relationship With Sharing

Dirk Dallas' heavy Instagram use has earned him 106,000 followers, but that was only after he took a self-imposed break. "Instagram kind of consumed me," he admits.

After a few months of near-constant use, Dallas decided to take a break from Instagram.

“I actually stepped back for about four months,” he says. The app ended up taking away from Dallas's own experience of the very moments his followers were so keen to like.“Right off the bat, it made me very aware of my surroundings.... I was always trying to look for something epic to share.”

Dallas’s personal conflict exposes the potentially destructive relationship we can have with an app that also helps us connect in amazing ways.

"It seems that there are a few populations that are particularly impacted by these technologies," says Morgan G. Ames, a graduate of Stanford's PhD progam in communication who specializes in the ways new technologies impact our everyday lives. "One would be parents of younger children who can capture and share all aspects of the minutiae of their children's everyday lives.

"Some parents seem to feel a tremendous pressure to capture all of the 'important' moments of their child's lives, which can make their lives feel more exciting and important, but can also add a great deal of stress," she adds.

This idea that people were so consumed with sharing their every moment—something people previously said about the Facebook status and the tweet—seems magnified with Instagram. Taking a photo of your perfectly composed food suggests that you think it's beautiful enough to share with the world—but not delicious enough to start eating immediately.

And food photos are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about every time you visit a famous landmark, ride your bike past a beautiful landscape, or notice how striking the light of the sunset looks against the clouds.

"Many photographs today are take-once and view-once (probably in the next few days), and have little value beyond that, at least currently," Ames says. "I can imagine archaeologists sifting through our digital remains sometime in the future and these photographs serving useful functions for them, but will we ever go back and look at our meals and shopping lists and pretty sunsets? It's hard to say."

When Systrom explains the ideas driving Instagram's popularity, he strikes a particularly interesting note when he says that life in the digital age is driven by staying in touch, that central desire of human nature that made us, in the pre-smartphone age, increasingly more separated from those we used to know as time goes on.

“Success to us in the future is where everyone in the world has the Instagram app in their lives,” he says.

Keeping in touch through Instagram is a fantastic solution to bridging the thousands of miles that separate us from friends and family members, but it’s also a very superficial and one-sided take on the social network. To go deeper, Ames suggest, you have to be willing to accept the fact that Instagram has cheapened the photographic image, and therefore by extension, lessened the value we get out of moments we're so eager to share.

"It seems that photographs are now more commonly being used as a stand-in for medium-term and even short-term memories as well," she says. "Even though the resulting photographs are cheapened, the pressure to take the photographs in the first place hasn't necessarily lessened."

“Success to us in the future is where everyone in the world has the Instagram app in their lives."

Viewed through a social-network lens, if Twitter is an inside look into someone’s mind from a textual standpoint, and Facebook a view into that person’s world from a social one, then Instagram is the next frontier: the closest thing to participating in someone else’s physical experience, visually.

That’s where the pitfalls for all of us reside. Ames sums up the ambiguity of Instagram's value when pitted against the compulsions it fosters on a personal note.

"I rarely go back and look through these photographs I've taken—time and attention, as always, are the bottlenecks—and I sometimes joke, even as I take photos, that it'd be better if I just put the camera away and experience the world more directly," she says.

"Of course, I don't."

Image Control

When Dallas rejoined Instagram in late 2011, he felt refreshed. It was this new take on the app that let him approach it in a manner that reassured him he had the control, and 100,000 plus more followers without needing another break set that in stone.

"I would say 99% of my feed is iPhone," Dallas says.

Since then, Dallas’s life as an Instagram celebrity of sorts has pushed him far beyond what he imagined possible when, at his friend’s insistence more than two years ago, he put the app back on his iPhone home screen.

More recently, he was approached by Orchestra, the company behind iOS email app Mailbox, while it was in beta. It wanted to feature his and other Instagrammers' photos as a reward for users who hit “inbox zero”—a state of cutting through email clutter. (That's how ReadWrite first heard of Dallas's work.)

When Toyota approached him recently for a special vehicle shoot, they didn’t want the photos he could take with his Canon 5D Mark III. “They wanted me to bring my iPhone,” he says with a laugh.

“I’m still looking for awesome shots to share that are interesting and maybe inspiring, but I’m trying to not let it just be about Instagram,” he says. It’s a feeling not so unfamiliar to many of us in our daily lives who find ourselves in conflict with the obtrusive nature of a smartphone and the crisp click of a shutter-mimicking tone the moment a scene strikes us.

For Dallas, it helped to tell himself, “‘Hey, I’m at this cool spot, I need to be here right now, live in the moment.’" For him, the pitfalls of the app are avoidable through this self-meditation. “So now I feel like I’m bringing Instagram with me as opposed to I’m just going somewhere to Instagram.”

Just last month, Dallas visited some visually stunning spots in Arizona and New Mexico with friends, and brought along his Canon DSLR because he was less worried about Instagram authenticity and the idea of an immediate post.

After his trip came to a close, he shared a select few shots, specifically some astounding long exposure light images, with his followers, stressing to everyone that the shots were taken with his “big-boy camera” for pure pleasure.

“I wanted to experience those in my eye, to make those memories,” he says, “and Instagram came along.”

Photo of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger by Nick Statt for ReadWrite; all other photos [except food photos] by Dirk Dallas

Just as water was the lifeblood of agriculture, content—photos, videos, links, status updates, and check-ins—is the lifeblood of the social Web. And those who would rule our digital worlds seek to have content pool up and flow at their command.

(Yes, in most cases, "content" is a loathsomely generic term. But it's hard to think of a better catch-all description that embraces all the varied material that flows between the Web's social services.)

Like water, the torrents of data generated by the billions of people online can never be fully controlled. But they can certainly be harnessed. And every node of connectivity between these networks is a potential flashpoint for border skirmishes.

Looked at in this light, it makes perfect sense that Tumblr went to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Thanks to years of neglect of properties like Flickr, Yahoo was a social backwater. Without a pool of social updates to call its own, Yahoo would always be subject to the whims of Twitter, Facebook, and the rest. Now it is part of the flow.

Battle Lines

Just like water in the physical world—a scarce, well-guarded resource—these flows of content can turn contentious.

Just ask Instagram, which saw Twitter cut off access to its list of friends, and retaliated by requiring an extra click to see images. Or Path, which lets photos flow to Facebook but had the return flow abruptly (and quietly) cut off earlier this year. Or how, last year, Twitter snubbed Linkedin, a longtime partner, restricting access to the tweets that used to show up on users' online resumes.

To begin to understand these conflicts, it helps to start with a map. For that, we're borrowing a concept from hydrology—that of sources and sinks.

Sources And Sinks On The Social Web

Content must begin somewhere. These points of creation, like the upload of a YouTube video or the snapping of an Instagram photo, are sources.

It must likewise end up somewhere. The nexus of creation is not always the natural place of consumption. For example, on Path, the mobile-focused social network, a substantial number of users opt to share moments on Twitter, CEO Dave Morin recently told me. That may seem odd, considering Path's limitations on the number of friends you can add, but it allows users to reach more people with updates that aren't especially private.

And a large reason why Instagram became so big so fast—and was courted by Twitter before it was bought by Facebook for a billion dollars—was that it was so easy to share photos not just on Instagram but on those larger social networks. By establishing itself as a source to those sinks, Instagram emerged as a powerful pool of visuals in its own right.

Foursquare, which began as a source for location check-ins posted out to Twitter and Facebook, may now be more important as a sink for other apps' check-ins—in particular, Instagram, where many photos are tagged with a location derived from Foursquare's vast database.

Precisely because these flows have value, they are points of leverage and vulnerability. Yet they also show the social Web's fragile interdependence.

Twitter And Facebook: A Sinking Feeling

The world's most important social networks have long battled over their lists of friends. Early on, Facebook invited Twitter to be one of the first apps on its platform. But in 2010, when Twitter added a feature to let people find their Facebook friends on its information network, Facebook abruptly cut it off. Since then, the two services have engaged in a tit-for-tat sparring.

After Facebook bought Instagram, Twitter cut off the ability to find friends on Instagram. Facebook did the same when Twitter launched Vine, its short-video app.

Yet while they fought over friends' lists, they never cut off a mutual flow of status updates. You can use Twitter to update Facebook—and, confusingly, you can opt to automatically send your public Facebook statuses out on Twitter, too. That's because while each service prefers to be the ultimate sink for content, it doesn't want its rival to become a more powerful source.

LinkedIn, lacking the leverage over Twitter that Facebook holds, went from being what Twitter called "the perfect combination" in 2009 to something incompatible with "delivering a consistent Twitter experience." After some worries that LinkedIn would feel less lively without tweets, the rift actually worked out for its media ambitions. It turns out that many tweets weren't that professional in nature, and LinkedIn has moved from being a sink for tweets to a purer source of work-related information. Which, of course, it is now trying to have flow to more sinks.

There are more twists and turns and intriguing dead ends in these flows of content. Did you know, for example, that you can't pin updates from Facebook to Pinterest—even if they're posted publicly on a brand's Facebook Page? Or that Google+ is a virtual island, rejecting crossposted material as "social spam"?

Here's where the Web's content flows stand as of 2013. For simplicity, we haven't shown every possible connection. And events may swiftly make this map outdated. Last year, it certainly looked different. Next year, we'll see new linkages and blockages. Like a fast-moving river cutting through the landscape and reshaping it as it goes, the only constant we can expect is change.

Most social network founders want to make money. Ijad Madisch, the scientist-CEO behind ResearchGate, has a higher goal: He wants to win a Nobel Prize for the network.

Five years after its founding, Madisch's plan doesn’t seem so far-fetched. ResearchGate, which has been described as “LinkedIn for scientists,” has 2.9 million users — about half of the international scientific community. Madisch has built a list of success stories in which scientists used ResearchGate to speed up their work. And as of now, he’s got a formidable supporter you may have heard of: Bill Gates.

On Monday, ResearchGate announced its third round of funding, $35 million, led by Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital.

In Search Of Open Science

“[Gates] liked in general the whole concept of open science,” Madisch told ReadWrite. “It aligns perfectly with his goals to eradicate diseases and make scientific information publicly available.”

A scientist himself, Madisch founded 2008 with the intent of creating a social network he would want to use .

“I had a research problem I couldn’t solve on my own, so I started looking for other scientists who could help me out,” he said. “I discovered that it’s impossible using the current structure of the internet to find these people easily.

“I realized science was broken,” he added.

Madisch is referring to the scientific practice of only publishing successful studies in research journals. That means negative data, failed data and raw data often never get shared.

All Data Is Useful

On ResearchGate, however, all data is considered useful. The network encourages scientists to submit even their failed experiments for peer review. That helps keep other scientists from attempting experiments that don’t work, but can also show that the original scientist was closer to the truth than he thought when he discarded the experiment.

One of ResearchGate’s many documented examples: Rick Arneil Aracon, a graduate student in the Philippines, thought he had developed a formula for creating energy out of waste oil. His professor told him the formula didn’t work, so Aracon posted it on his ResearchGate account as failed data.

Little did he know it would be seen by Rafael Luque, an organic chemist in Spain, who saw hidden potential in the formula, which turned out to be very close to correct. Together, the unlikely pair developed and documented a new technique for creating biofuel.

ResearchGate Is Really Happening—Just Not Earning Any Money

“This is not just a dream I’m having that people could someday use ResearchGate to create scientific breakthroughs,” said Madisch. “It’s really happening.”

For all its breakthroughs, though, ResearchGate has yet to make any revenue. But with Gates backing the company, running out of money shouldn’t be a problem for a long time. Madisch had plans to monetize a marketplace for scientific jobs and lab equipment, but now he can put that idea aside in favor of priming the network to seek that Nobel Prize.

“I always wanted to change something in science, something big. I knew if you want to achieve that, you need great people to help you,” Madisch said.

Lead photo of Bill Gates by OnInnovation. Photo of Ijad Madisch via ResearchGate.

App.net, the ad-free social network and blogging service, is a fascinating experiment in community-building when all outside influence has been stripped away. Limiting messages to 256 characters and relying an exclusive invite-only growth process, App.net has steadily become a destination for those looking to avoid the clutter of Twitter and Facebook.

Starting right now, ReadWrite users can join the network with a special invite for the first 500 people to click the link at the bottom of this post. The only caveat: you'll become a follower of our account.

What Is App.net?

Launched in August of last year, App.net was the second creation of Mixed Media Labs, an app-making company helmed by Dalton Caldwell that built an ill-fated Instagram competitor called picplz. App.net has been far more successful. The service, which initially relied on an annual subscription fee to avoid sticking advertisements in front of users, changed its pricing model when its user base far surpassed Caldwell's goal and hit 20,000 last October.

Get In Free!

App.net now has an invite-only free model, which gives users 500MB of storage and the ability to follow up to 40 accounts. For $36 a year (down from $50 after an October price drop), users get 10GB of storage and the ability to follow an unlimited number of accounts. Inviting friends on the yearly member status also earns you more storage.

In early May, App.net brought down some of the barriers to its service with the launch of its iOS passport app. Put simply, App.net Passport lets users, for the first time, sign up for free without an invitation and tinker with some cosmetic features of their profile, but the app mainly serves as a way to discover the social network's growing list of cross-platform clients.

This wider sign-up reach may be temporary, Caldwell says. So for those without an iPhone looking to join App.net, remember to click the link below before the initial 500 invites run dry.

A Risky Picture

The danger LinkedIn faces is that its stream of work-related content will become cluttered with the kind of vapid visual noise that has taken over Facebook's News Feed. Facebook, in the hopes of spurring people to post better pictures of moments in their lives, started giving photos larger display. Instead, people posted picture quotes and memes.

LinkedIn seems to be more or less rolling with this particular consumer behavior: It even shows an example of someone posting an inspirational quote image.

Like it or not, this is a way a lot of people like to communicate online. So perhaps LinkedIn is smart to embrace it. But after LinkedIn and Twitter broke off their partnership last summer, requiring people to post updates directly on LinkedIn rather than porting their tweets into LinkedIn, the quality of LinkedIn's stream of status updates improved markedly, since people primarily posted professional updates without personal updates from Twitter mixed in.

Putting images in LinkedIn's stream could go sideways, so we have to hope its product team is watching what users do closely and adjusting accordingly.

Dropbox And Box In LinkedIn's Sights?

One interesting aspect to LinkedIn's update is that it's also allowing companies to post images and documents to their company pages.

The ostensible reason for this is to appeal to the people who follow a particular company on LinkedIn, who are typically employees, job seekers, customers, or other interested parties. One obvious way a tech company might use this, for example, is to post white papers about a new product it's rolling out.

One has to wonder, though, if this isn't also a move to carve out part of the document-sharing business that Dropbox, Box and YouSendIt have so far dominated. That's the public-facing sharing, where you're not sending a document to a particular person but merely alerting people to a place from which it can be downloaded.

We don't see LinkedIn swerving from its media-focused strategy right now. But LinkedIn's mission isn't to be a media company - it's to help people succeed in their professions. So if at some point it decides sharing and collaboration around documents is part of how it accomplishes that mission, Box and the rest should worry.

For now, it's just an interesting option LinkedIn could pursue down the road, for which it's laying the groundwork now.

All of this is great news for heavy users of Google+ who have been awaiting a design push that looks and feels like 2013. But there's still one giant problem plaguing the service and Google's entire social platform at large: the hub of your Google life is still an email address, and that's a nightmare for users with multiple Gmail accounts.

Since taking over as CEO in 2011, Larry Page has been talking up the notion of "One Google" to unify the search giant's disparate services. But the reality is that it's very hard as a user to experience a unified Google until Google realizes that a person is a person, not an email account.

At best, the complex process of trying to manage multiple Gmail accounts with Google+ and all the various apps involved slows users down. At worst, it could keep some users from adopting the beautiful new services altogether.

Two Accounts, Twice The Pain

"For me personally, I have two Google accounts: I have a corporate and personal [account], and it is a pain," admitted Seth Sternberg, director of product management for Google+, in a roundtable discussion with reporters in San Francisco Thursday. And Sternberg is definitely not alone. Many people have two Google email accounts—a personal Gmail and a corporate Google Apps account. Those ought to be Google's best users. Instead, they're the most frustrated ones.

And many people set up multiple email accounts for other reasons. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn let them associate multiple email addresses with a single personal or professional identity. Google doesn't.

What that ends up doing is disrupting the entire process of laying the Google+ social net atop the Web. Every time a user tries to +1 a link, log into a website with Google+ sign-in, or personalize search, they're confronted with Google's fragmented view of online identity.

So for Google, the email-as-account concept disrupts users' ability to seamlessly use Google+, which in turn makes the network's constantly increasing integration with the rest of the company's apps and services more and more painful with every turn. And for users, it's just plain obnoxious having to use incognito browser windows and all sorts of other workarounds to try and simply manage their online identity.

No wonder Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are the go-to networks for finding friends and sharing information.

Identity, If And When You Want It

Google says it's trying to get better.

"We sanded off all the rough edges," David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, said in the recent roundtable event. Google, to its credit, has introduced an account chooser that makes it easier to stay logged into multiple accounts.

What Google really needs is something above an email address that could be used as an identifier for all of a user's various accounts. This higher-level identifier could be something akin to a Twitter handle or a Facebook username.

This new Google login could have a registered primary email address—the way Apple and Amazon handle logins to their online accounts—but it should sync up your other Google+ accounts.

Separating personal and professional sharing could be simply handled with a strongly established Google+ concept: Circles, or lists of contacts.

(And, of course, you should still be able to establish a Gmail account for an unlinked, throwaway identity—for, say, a Craigslist posting or mailing lists.)

Umbrellas Are Good

Google showcased its ability to neatly fold up services with Hangouts, and the strategy is a no-brainer. It resolves so many problems users face when a company's products are all around them, yet they have no idea how to manage them all and end up just turning away from what they feel they don't need.

An umbrella strategy to Google+ and Gmail is a much taller order, but it's one of the biggest impediments standing between the search giant and a more steady, fuller-scale adoption of its social network. So Google, please give us that umbrella, and you'll likely see more people standing underneath it if its done right.

With a whirlwind of announcements at its Google I/O developers conference this week, Google's vast suite of social products is finally starting to look like it was created by a single company and not cobbled together via a series of haphazard acquisitions. Here are the highlights of what's changed:

Hangouts: Google Messaging, Unmessy At Last

Google is finally doing something to prune its thicket of messaging products. Let's start with a look at the various chat and messaging products that were due for some much-needed spring cleaning:

Google Talk. Talk was Google's Instant Message client. It's also called Google Chat or "GChat," by many people who didn't even know it was called Talk to begin with.

Google+ Hangouts. Hangouts was Google+'s group video chat service, from the social network's launch back in 2011.

Google Voice: Google's cult-hit digital telephony client, Voice allows users to route all their calls to one phone number. Google Voice works for calls and texting both on desktop and on its much-neglected mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Now, Hangouts becomes the messaging mini-umbrella under the social mega-umbrella of Google+. Hangouts, now available across desktop and mobile, will unify Google Talk, Google+ Messenger and the old Hangouts video chat service of yore.

According to a statement from Nikhyl Singhal, Google's head honcho of real-time communications, Google Voice will be folded into Hangouts too (Yay!), though there's no word on when.

Google+ Gets A Lot Of Love

Messaging may have been the messiest area of Google's social services, but Google+ is the big umbrella that covers them all. Amidst the company's epic 3-hour-plus Google I/O keynote yesterday, Google+ guru Vic Gundotra announced approximately one million updates to Google+, the social network that the company launched two years ago. Okay, he pegged the number at 41 … but that's almost a million.

The updates are extensive. As a regular Google+ user, it's actually difficult to get a sense for what changed, since the redesign looks and feels right in stride with Google's recent overall changes in user interfaces that runs from Google+ to Google Glass to Google Now and Android. So here's a list of some of the most notable of the 41 updates:

A multi-column layout. This can be toggled off, if you're still into the Blogger single-column-era.

Photos and videos get even bigger. Google is really into making media massive - and we would be too if the average person knew how to share properly high-res photos.

New animations. Things are flipping and sliding all over the place in there.

A third dimension. You can scroll up and down through your social stream, but Google wants you to be able to scroll in too. Now you can take a deeper dive on a given Google+ post -or is it a Card? I think we're suppose to call everything Cards now -- via related hashtags, which will lead you to more content of interest. It will also take you further down the Google+ rabbit hole, of course.

Lots of treats for photographers. Google+ has a thriving community of awesome photogs, and Google is keen to do right by them. Photos in Google+ now have all sorts of cool bells and whistles. A few I'm particularly stoked about include "auto highlight," which de-emphasizes duplicate and blurry pics, automatically picking the best shot out of a batch. I've yet to test this extensively, but since I have a habit of bracketing (taking multiple shots at different exposures) - even on my phone - choosing the best photo of a set can be a major timesuck. This feature could help there. Another feature, "Auto Awesome," can stitch together shots in a series to make a playful Photobooth-esque picture or even a Vine-like animated gif.

For a full breakdown of Google's social updates, hit the company's official blog post or just cruise around in Google+ for a while. The social network has been the butt of many a joke over the last few years, and we're happy to see Google take the time to spruce things up a little.

Would you trust the "wisdom of the crowd" over your own doctor? CrowdMed thinks you might. The San Francisco start-up has an audacious plan to use crowdsourcing techniques to tap the "collective wisdom" of strangers to help diagnose patients - particularly those who've bounced from doctor to doctor for years trying to understand uncommon symptoms.

While many may worry that healthcare is too important to trust to strangers, I think this is awesome.

Ask Your Doctor? No. Ask the Crowd.

CrowdMed works like this: Patients pay a $199 fee to list their case on CrowdMed. They fill out a "patient questionnaire" that details their symptoms, case history and personal information. Though CrowdMed founder Jared Heyman declined to say exactly how many patients have enrolled so far, he claimed that there has been "pretty strong demand." Without the fee, Heyman explained, the site would be overwhelmed with patients who might not get diagnosed.

Once a case is posted, the crowd, what CrowdMed somewhat coyly terms "MDs" - for "medical detectives" - can review the patient's information and offer up what they believe is the correct - or most likely - diagnosis.

According to Heyman, "close to 3,000 people have signed up as medical detectives." He said CrowdMed's "MDs" include doctors, residents and "regular people that like solving medical mysteries." Why sign up to be a medical detective? First, there's the chance to help patients. Second, CrowdMed awards its detectives "points" for the diagnoses they correctly predict.

CrowdMed utilizes a so-called prediction market methodology to help glean the correct diagnosis. For example, when a detective selects a case to review, they use up some of their points. They use up still more when they suggest a diagnosis or vote up (or down) other suggested diagnoses. Essentially, it "costs" to play. The more accurate their predictions, however, the more points they are ultimately awarded.

Points do not have any cash value, however. For now, they can be exchanged only for donations to Watsi, an organization that helps fund medical treatments in the developing world. Heyman did not say how much CrowdMed is donating.

While it's true that CrowdMed's detectives may not always correctly diagnose a particular patient, if they can narrow the likelihood of someone's illness to, say, two or three likely options - those that garner the most points, for example - that could speed up decision making and help point to which tests should be perfomed.

In Crowd We Trust?

The obvious question: Can a crowd of strangers with unknown amounts of medical expertise be trusted to safely and correctly diagnose baffling medical problems? CrowdMed claims that after "four years of development" it possess a patented "unique technology" specifically designed to optimize group intelligence for medical diagnostic purposes. From its site:

Groups hold far more knowledge collectively than any individual member, no matter how brilliant. With hundreds of minds working in parallel, groups can process information much faster than individuals.

Heyman told me that his sister suffered for three years from a rare disease. Once it was finally correctly diagnosed, doctors were able to significantly ease her symptoms. CrowdMed used her case to help validate its model - Heyman says it accurately diagnosed her within days.

What Do Real MDs Think?

The first rule of medicine is primum non nocere, Latin for "first, do no harm." It does not necessarily apply to the crowd. Not surprisingly, the CrowdMed approach bothers many real doctors.

Dr. Hubert Chen, the Associate Medical Director for biotech pioneer Genentech, said, "I want to be enthusiastic, but I have concerns about it." Dr. Chen's primary concern was the potential for numerous "false positives" that CrowdMed's "detectives" might generate: "I've seen many patients misled by the Web. Doctors often have to un-educate them."

Dr. Aaron Roland, wo runs a family practice in northern California and is an associate clinical professor at UC San Francisco, had different concerns. "I wouldn't pay $200," Rolan said. He also wondered whether CrowdMed could attract the scale it needs. "Crowdsourcing is good when there's a lot of people in the crowd," he said, "but until you get that crowd, I'm suspicious."

Industry Connections

To help attract the required crowd, Heyman recruited Clare Martorana, the long-time editor of WebMD, to help support CrowdMed's outreach efforts.

Not surprisingly, Martorana was very positive about the concept. There are many "experts," she said, not necessarily doctors, who may have suffered from a particular disease, or have a family member who has suffered, and whom can now contribute to the site.

She hopes to "reach out" to staffers - not just doctors - at medical research, counseling and support organizations that concentrate on specific issues - think, autism, for example, or Parkinson's dioease - and encourage them to participate in CrowdMed.

Martorana also suggested crowdsourcing diagnoses could be a boon for health insurance companies: "If you are insured and going to multiple specialists, but not getting relief, that costs a lot of money - you, your employer, your insurer all must bear those costs. At some point, there probably will be a pretty significant revenue stream for CrowdMed coming from insurance companies. Right now, their cost numbers are staggering."

Staggering Potential

The relatively paltry $1.1 million CrowdMed has raised so far suggest that investors remain unsure of the idea's potential risks and rewards. But connecting patients with chronic medical symptoms to experts, regardless of their titles, clearly holds massive disruptive potential. CrowdMed's ambitious, even inspiring idea is to use connectivity, collaboration and collective intelligence to help people avoid needless suffering. Despite the risks, it seems like it's a worth a try to me.

If you've got a lot of selfies, your tapping finger is in for a major workout. Today, Instagram pushed version 3.5 of its app to the iOS App Store and Google Play — and it's a big one for brands and users alike.

Instagram 3.5 adds the ability to tag other Instagrammers in the photos you take. Unlike Facebook, where photo tagging has been routine for years, Instagram devotees have relied on a bare-bones system of @tags in the comments section below photos to give other users the heads-up that a given image is relevant to them.

I asked an Instagram rep if the new tagging feature is a play for making more money off mobile use — a revenue stream Facebook has square in its crosshairs. The company denies it: "At this time Instagram isn’t focused on monetization. [Instagram] rolled out this new feature because it was a missing piece to let people tell their stories... and to make it easier to add people and things to photos."

Photos of You also gives people a new way to explore photos of your business or brand. People can now add their favorite band to their concert photos from last night, the clothing brand they’re currently wearing or the coffee roaster who brews their morning cup of coffee. As a business or brand, Photos of You gives you a new way to curate and share the photos that best showcase your brand your brand[sic] as documented by your biggest fans.

Instagram's Biggest Update In, Well, As Long As We Can Remember

Instagram hasn't made many major overhauls to its winning formula since launching in October 2010. Over the course of the last year, the app has trickled in a few new photo filters, a map view and a web interface, but not too much has changed — even after the great Instagram ToS debacle of last December.

Considering the level of loyalty that the company enjoys — particularly when compared to peers like its oft-disdained parent company — not tinkering with its recipe is smart. But, happily, so is this update.

Since version 3.5 was a simultaneous launch across platforms, Android and iPhone users eager to get their tag on can download the new app now. Update 3.5 also boasts improvements to image quality for photos uploaded on Android 4.0 and above (a relief for any Instagrammers who wonder why those Android photos never look quite right).

Once you've got it downloaded, a pop-up will point to the new section, which lives on the far-right profile button (click the little image that looks like a driver's license).

In the profile view, you'll be greeted with a very Facebook-like silhouette of a person, again on the far right. This "photos of you" section compiles exactly that, though it will remain private until May 16 to give you time to pick your best selfie angles and curate accordingly.

Why Brands Should Be Taking Notes

While other recent feature tweaks haven't shaken things up too much for Instagram, version 3.5 has all the trappings of a game-changer. Users will be pleased to have photos taken of them heaped into one neat little memory pile, while brands should be thrilled with their higher visibility on the young advertising platform. With photo tagging enabled, Instagram's platform should provide some unique perspectives on brand reach and the demographics of who is engaging and why.

Plenty of brands have launched heavy-handed hashtag campaigns in an effort to figure out what makes Instagram users — ahem, potential customers — tick. Now, with the tagging feature, Instagram users will have a natural incentive to tag not just the "who", but the "what" and "where," too. Which should, in turn, spur more businesses to rev up their Instagramming.

But just remember, brands: Keep it real. An awkward hashtag is a fate worse than a grainy, Hefe-filtered selfie.

Editor's Note: This is part 1 of a 3-part series covering Len Kendall’s abstinence from the “Like” button throughout April.

Amidst the Boston Marathon tragedy, Facebook on Monday was a fascinating environment to observe. There was so much to NOT "like" that day—gruesome pictures shortly followed by inspirational images and quotes. Either way, merely hitting a button seemed inadequate to me.

Good thing I'd already decided I wasn't going to "like" anything this month.

I ended up just donating money to the Red Cross Blood Collection service and then staying fairly silent.

The tragedy merely confirmed my decision to change a behavior that I, like many, have adopted into my daily activities. I'm not going to “like” anything on the internet. Anywhere. Not on Facebook, and not on websites featuring a similar “like” button.

Let me back up.

Not so long ago, there was a much wider gap between the various methods for acknowledging online content. At one end, you had the option of reading something and then doing absolutely nothing. On the other, you had things like leaving a comment, emailing the post to a friend, or writing a blog post in response to another you read elsewhere.

But in early 2009, an extremely low-impact feature came to exist: the "like." It was a brilliant addition, and it quickly has become a staple of daily Internet activity across the world, websites, and devices. It wasn't the first or last of its kind, but the "like" did ultimately become something that now gets billions of clicks. Facebook alone generates somewhere around 3 billion "likes" a day.

This weekend I stopped to evaluate my own usage of this button and came to the following unscientific but plausible conclusions:

Only 5% of the time when I “like” something on the Web am I doing so to share it explicitly with my network. I do believe, though, that clicking “like” within Facebook helps drive what content becomes popular for my friends and myself. Sometimes it’s a big life moment like a wedding, other times it’s an Amazon review for a Banana Slicer.

Hitting the “like” button on Facebook itself has stopped me from writing comments (and articulating actual thoughts) in response to items others are posting. I feel like I've already done enough by clicking a button.

I’ve hit the "like" button thousands of times out of obligation, for worry that I might hurt someone's feelings or make them feel ignored.

So reviewing all the points above, I wondered about the following question: Who exactly is benefitting the most from me hitting this button? That’s the question I'm trying to solve for with this experiment.

In the meantime, here are a few observations from my first 72 hours of not hitting the “like” button—an action that I have taken everyday for probably the last two years.

1) I already slipped up once and had to go "unlike" something I "liked." It bothered me how mechanical the act of reading Facebook posts and "liking" had become.

2) I started leaving 10x more comments on posts, and have spent more time articulating my responses to longer discussion threads.

3) While my time spent on Facebook has continued to decrease, taking away the act of “liking” has further reduced my time on the social network and increased it on Twitter, Reddit, and get this…email.

4) I’ve continued to check Facebook immediately when a notification flag has popped up to see who has liked my posts. I suspect this won’t change throughout the experiment.

I may be overanalyzing here, but my hope is that it will spur others to reflect on their own low-impact, low-investment habits online. I’ll be providing a report in the next week or so with further observations. For now, I encourage you to either join me in this experiment, leave a comment below, or ... do absolutely nothing.

Understanding what people do on different social networks is the key to effectively using those networks for marketing. Companies currently spend 8.4% of their marketing budgets on social media, and that’s expected to grow to 21.6% in the next five years. But with so many social networks competing to grab marketing dollars, determining the most effective channels can be extremely difficult. To illustrate, let’s look at how Facebook and Pinterest stack up against one another.

Different Networks For Different Reasons

While both Facebook and Pinterest offer deep customer segmentations and user engagement, it would be a mistake to target audiences in the same way across both networks. For example, you wouldn’t market your product to someone shopping at a trendy boutique the same way you would to someone walking down the street with their friends. In a store, you’d likely look to make a sale, while on the street you’d probably have more luck building brand awareness.

Similarly, BloomReach’s analysis consistently shows that Pinterest has a higher concentration of people who are in a ‘buy’ state of mind, while Facebook users are more interested in interacting with friends - and brands. (According to Paul Adams, Facebook’s global head of brand design, Facebook’s strength is relationship-building, noting that many lightweight interactions over time can help promote brands.)

Traffic Analysis Tells The Tale

That is borne out by BloomReach’s analysis of total traffic – 46,277,543 site visits – for a set of retail clients from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2012. We looked at five key metrics: total traffic, revenue per visit, conversion rate, bounce rate and average pages viewed. While Facebook delivered more than 7.5 times the traffic, Pinterest handily won the remaining four areas:

Pinterest traffic spent 60% more than did traffic coming from Facebook.

Pinterest traffic converted to a sale 22% more than Facebook.

Facebook traffic bounced 90% of the time, compared to 75% for Pinterest.

Facebook users viewed an average of 1.6 pages. Pinterest users saw an average of 2.9 pages – an 81% difference.

The average revenue per visit for Pinterest traffic was more than $1.50. But while Pinterest is able to drive highly lucrative leads – and the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses should help companies make use of them - it can deliver only a relatively limited set of eyeballs.

Facebook Still Rules Awareness

If a company’s goal is to simply reach a larger audience to create or maintain brand awareness, Facebook remains the best option. Its sheer volume of users – 1.06 billion active monthly users, 680 million mobile users and 618 million daily users – and the army of people ready to sell impressions make it an easy channel to leverage. But it may be difficult to realize an immediate return on marketing investments on the network.

Perhaps the best approach is to look for ways to optimize Facebook campaign while expanding Pinterest presence. Both Facebook and Pinterest should become larger parts of the media mix model as visitor referrals from these sites grow. At the end of 2012, only 2.7% of total traffic in our analysis came from the networks, demonstrating that social commerce is still in an early stage. In the meantime, though, it seems fair to say that Pinterest is a more efficient marketing channel than Facebook.

If I can recommend a great local restaurant, leave a review for future patrons, alert my followers on Twitter, update my Facebook friends on my great new find - all in a few seconds - using only Yelp and my iPhone, why can't I similarly promote those businesses whose values I support?

Why is it so easy to tell thousands of people, literally, how awful a coffee shop's service is, for example, but I can't as easily steer people away from a store whose values I deplore?

It seems to me there should be an app - or maybe lots of apps - that make it easy for me to find, check-in, rate, review and recommend those businesses whose values align with mine. Forget pet friendly - are they gay friendly, Earth friendly? Do they seek a massive reduction in the size of government, do they refuse to buy from China, will they never cross a union picket line and can I count on them to support a strong national defense?

With the Yelp app, for example, I can easily set various parameters for a restaurant search: proximity, price range, type of food and customer ranking. But values is not one of the choices. This seems like a rather significant gap within the mobile-social-local nexus.

Values Equal Profits

There does not yet exist a robust analog for finding and supporting businesses I want to promote because of their values, and not simply their price, location or customer service. Why is that? In today's connected world - when anyone can get anything from anywhere, and always at the best price - values can become a core differentiator.

I don't want my money going to a business that is opposed to gay marriage. Perhaps that's exactly what you do want. Why not incorporate a "values" layer into Foursquare, for example and discover and share those businesses that have the very best lattes - and the strongest support for the values most important to me.

Foursquare users, for example, can "discover and learn about great places nearby, search for what you’re craving, and get deals and tips along the way." The app's 30 million users have checked in to various establishments more than 3 billion times. Consider the potential social good Foursquare could foster if values were made into a searchable variable.

The Trust Issue

Can people be trusted to not list a business as, say, homophobic, just because they were angry over the price or a long line to check out? Is it possible to know if a business legitimately supports climate-change improvements, for example, or is really working to limit poverty? It may be hard for a business to lie about its prices but all too easy to claim social and political stances that it doesn't back up with actions.

Fortunately, with more than a hundred million smartphones in use in America - more than 1 billion worldwide - the aggregate numbers and big data "smoothing" of billions of values-based check-ins and reviews should mitigate any lies or mistakes. For example, Amazon product reviews can generally be relied upon as a valid barometer of popular sentiment, even though they're completely subjective.

A few websites already provide a limited form of "values-based" recommendations for businesses. For example, OutGrade, launched earlier this year, lets users "rate places by gay friendliness or homophobia." Users rate establishments on a scale from -5 to +5, and the site color codes businesses based on their overall score: red is homophobic, green is " gay friendly." The OutGrade site accepts ratings for any business: restaurant, dentist office, pub, hotel, etc. and in three months has garnered reviews on more than 3,500 businesses.

OutGrade plans to release a mobile app "in the coming weeks." This is vital as it allows users to simply pull out their smartphones and find acceptable places in their immediate vicinity. While a website may offer a more robust experience, only an app can provide real-time location-based ratings and reviews, while boosting the reliability of recommendations by letting users initiate reviews on the spot.

One More Step

Why not an app that alerts me to a store's values as I walk inside? Or that alerts me to a product whose maker I want to support? For example, when I stare at that massive beer selection in the grocery store, perhaps my "values app" can remind me that Bud Light used social media to support gay marriage.

Plenty of apps and sites focus on a specific value or set of values, or utilize a top-down approach, where those who create the app set the rankings. This is a good start, but does not fully empower smartphone user to personally rate businesses by the values that matter to them.

For example, the Good Guide site rates an array of products that are "healthy, green and socially responsible." While useful, the information covers only selected products and is rated by a "team of scientific and technology experts," not actual users.

The FishPhone app offers a similar service and provides the seafood ratings system for Whole Foods. Of course, Whole Foods' CEO was famously opposed to Obamacare. The app would never tell me that.

This is a critical problem with single-focus and those not maintained not by the end users. For example, Ceres, "a network of over 130 investment funds, environmental organizations, unions and interest groups" promotes major companies that are making significant progress on sustainability goals. Ford was a recent winner. That's great, unless you believe that a large automobile manufacturer should never be included on a list of sustainability leaders.

Getting Comfortable With Controversial Topics

The issue preventing a user-driven values based shopping app is not a technical one. The larger issue is that too many of us are not yet comfortable with the very idea of values-based recommendations.

When it comes to choosing goods and services, we have spent our whole lives focused on price, quality and convenience. Values are fuzzy, harder to quantify - and can lead to difficult decisions. What if your friendly, neighborhood grocer, for example, turns out be a climate change denier - and you live in area prone to flooding? Once you learn the values of a business and determine you are in opposition, would you continue to shop there? Will supporting only businesses whose values align with yours merely serve to divide society instead of promoting the values in question?

The technology to make this possible already exists, so it's likely we'll have the answers soon enough.

In honor of Opening Day, digital marketing firm Silverpop analyzed the social-mobile activities of all thirty Major League Baseball teams and their fans. Even better, they put their data into an infographic.

What have we learned? The New York Yankees, despite embarrassing themselves in last year's playoffs, are the most social team in baseball. (No Derek Jeter jokes allowed.)

The Yankees and the Red Sox have the most Facebook fans. (The SF Giants, whose home field is just a city block away from ReadWrite HQ, trail in fourth place, surprisingly enough.) Meanwhile, the Brewers-Rockies game in Milwaukee, somewhat surprisingly, produced the most Foursquare check-ins among all stadiums on Opening Day.

Expect advertisers and social media platforms to continue to reach out to baseball fans in the stadium, even during those high-drama moments. Baseball fans clearly like to have their smartphones with them at the game.

One of the big promises of social networking is that it will inject your networking skills with PED (performance enhancing data), able to give you the biggest network on the block. If you're a believer in the raw power of oh-so many social connections, that's OK. But if you're like me, you'll already hearing Janet Jackson's hit, What Have You Done For Me Lately? playing in your head.

The problem with most social media is that the quality of your network degenerates as it grows. At first, best friends and business connections are added. Only to be followed by many requests from friends with few benefits. That sentiment may be harsh but in this day and age of Time Compression, the greatest value of business networking lies in its ability to improve daily dealings.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you've already discovered, many of your "extremely well-connected" network contacts turn out to be, more often than not, less than stellar. So expect the next generation of social networks to devote a lot more attention to the purview of social capital.

Doing It The Analog Way

One company that provides a peek into the future of social networking is New York-based Relationship Science, a company founded by Neal Goldman, who reportedly raised the first $3 million of his $60 million investment in just three days.

Relationship Science has built the ultimate business Who's Who directory, relying on a staff of more than 800 people, located mostly in India. The data gathered over the past two years is derived strictly from publicly available information, Relationship Science CMO Josh Mait tells me.

What sets the company apart from most online directories is its interface. As Mait describes it, Relationship Science offers "institutional grade data in a consumer-friendly interface."

To use the data effectively you need to identify people you know well. Once your relationships are tagged, the system will show your total number of first-degree connections, which in Mait's case was about 18,000 connections produced by just 50 tagged relationships.

Relationship Science has cataloged millions of people and organized their affinities, connections and special interests in the ultimate networking directory, also conveniently available via iPad, as this image demonstrates.

Finding A Path

One of the most powerful features of Relationship Science is Path Finder, which lets you visually see how you're connected to someone else, say for example, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Relationship links are color-coded as either strong, average or weak.

These relationships are based on many data elements, including education, memberships, interests, affiliations, career, boards, committees, non-profit donations, public holdings, awards and events. Anyone in sales will really appreciate this level of data granularity, all delivered in a simple interface.

Mait adds, "Our investors invested in the product because they saw themselves in it, networking is how they became successful." I truly believe that social networks like Linked In could learn from Relationship Science, although the company vigorously denies that it's a social network or a "traditional CRM system."

I predict that a lot of social innovation will come in the area of superior connection building. The watchword of the future being "social capital." People who blow other people off without communication will in the very near future be anonymously rated by their social media peers.

And those ratings will pop up in social capital databases that everyone will tap into. We can't wait to see how this futuristic science of relationships helps us all perform better. Until then, I suggest you spend $3,000 a year on Relationship Science. There's no better way to get to Howard Schultz.

Images via Relationship Science.

Editors Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly noted the cost of the Relationship Science service as $3000/month. It is actually $3000/year, and the article has been updated to reflect that amount.

According to Facebook, today the News Feed is comprised of about 50% "visual content." What began as a spartan little text entry box is now a full-fledged multimedia monster, for better or worse. But the advent of Facebook's new "bright beautiful stories" may just mean more visual detritus to brush away from the content we really want to see, assuming it's out there at all.

Goodbye Clutter?

Trying to get a screen capture of the new News Feed Photos page earlier today, I had to refresh about ten times before anything worthy of being highlighted bubbled up. But even then, the rest of the stuff on the page was such an eyesore, I just went with the Facebook PR team's stock shot. My Photos tab (and the News Feed at large) remains a confusing mixture of Someecards and random images that people scoop up from around the Web and don't attribute. I've probably been guilty of this too, but whatever - I'm the one writing this story.

In the News Feed example images, everything looks sogood. I mean, if all of my friends only posted high-res photographs of their amazing blue-skied skiing adventures, I wouldn't be complaining. Maybe I need to friend more of Facebook's staff - they can clearly afford vacations chock full of photo opps. (Maybe they'll bring me along? I'm a pretty good time. Just sayin'.)

The Memes Come Marching In

The invasion of the meme might be partly to blame. I remember when memes hit Tumblr and then took off. I'd been blogging there since 2009. Back then I'd post original photos and original writing and the people I followed did the same. Then suddenly, one day it just flipped - Tumblr became a place for recycling jokes and reposting lolcats. I lost interest in it immediately and haven't really blogged there since. Now that Facebook is dominated by image updates, the News Feed is a morass of recycled content - and again, I'm losing interest.

Instagram's Unspoken Rule

Facebook may own Instagram, but the social photo sharing network has its own set of rules - many of them unspoken, selfies aside. Instagram made generating original content fun again. Sure, we're just taking little snapshots and posting them in quasi-realtime, but that's a hell of a lot more interesting than a retweet or a video gone viral. If anyone on my Instagram posts a screencap or a picture lifted from a different source, I unfollow them. Instagram is training people to populate and curate their own little photo portals - and it encourages even first-time photographers to develop a unique aesthetic. It's no surprise that the most interesting images in my News Feed are all imported from Instagram. Instagram is a viewfinder, not a recycling bin.

Call me old fashioned. I like actual photos. I like text. I will not for the life of me watch a viral video unless I'm absolutely convinced it will be earth-shatteringly funny - and if I have to sit through an auto-play ad first, forget it. I'd take user-generated content on a sparse web 2.0-style personal blog over multimedia Web-recycling any day. Remember when people used to blog? Now most of us just move other people's content from one place to another and point at it.

Content Other Other People Create

Chris Cox, Facebook's VP of Product, summed it up this at Facebook's big announcement Thursday morning: "Fundamentally we're a container for content other people create." But most Facebook users don't create content, they just borrow it from someone else who probably borrowed it from someone else after it made the rounds on Tumblr a few months ago. None of this is Facebook's fault. I've been test-driving the redesign and it looks and works great. It's a web culture issue - one accentuated by the new News Feed's "bright, beautiful stories".

Maybe I'm just cynical. Or maybe there really is nothing new under the sun. But if you ask me, social sites need more content creators - and fewer diligent meme mules ferrying viral junk from point A to point B with their heads down.

Facebook just announced the biggest change to its design since Timeline shook things up back in 2011 — and actually, it looks pretty awesome. The big, popping visuals that Timeline introduced certainly heralded the News Feed redesign that Facebook announced today at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

Big Changes Rolling Out Gradually

Facebook learned its lesson from that redesign too: the new News Feed will be rolling out, starting today, very gradually — folding in user feedback all along the way. The new News Feed design even includes a button that lets you revert to the old design, you know, if you're the afraid-of-change type.

But even if you are that type, this interface overhaul will probably strike your fancy. I didn't even realize how long in the tooth Facebook was starting to look until I activated the new design.

If you're anxious for a peek at the new News Feed, we've got plenty of images outlining the major new features. And don't panic — change can be a good thing.

If you see this pop up on your News Feed, take the new design for a spin like so.

A new drop down menu makes it easy to hop between revamped News Feed hubs like Music, Games and Photos.

The new Music stream ties into apps like Spotify as well as posts by musicians, like Mr. Bowie.

So the notoriously shy and retiring Randi Zuckerberg, who has never traded on her better-known billionaire brother's success and influence to further her own ambitions, has decided to grace the world with what the Associated Press describes as a "memoir/lifestyle book" about her time at Facebook. Titled, naturally, Dot Complicated, which coincidentally is also what the demure Ms. Z calls her invitation-only "modern lifestyle newsletter." About which a little more in a moment.

A Good Zuckraking

What's RZ going to tell us? HarperCollins tells us she'll relate her "entrepreneurial journey" through her time at Facebook and beyond. You can probably count on her to give a whitewashed version of her parting of the ways with Facebook, which so far sounds pretty spicy. (Ms. Zuck herself has previously described herself at the time as being "a little irresponsible with my creativity" and going "a little rogue.")

You'll also doubtless be fascinated to learn that RZ'berg will also enlighten the masses on – believe it or not – "the multifaceted complications of our socially transparent world today, including issues of privacy, social identity, authenticity, crowd sourcing and the future of social change." Surely the ethics and human decency of photo sharing deserves its own chapter.

But wait, that's not all! Dot Complicated will also come as an enhanced e-book with "innovative and engaging interactive components," including a "platform for crowd sourced stories and social media integration" – whatever that is. Who wants to wager that Ms. Zuck will herself skillfully navigate the multifaceted complications of our socially transparent world by steering entirely clear of any controversies involving privacy, social identity, authenticity, crowd sourcing and the future of social change?

Technology has changed virtually every part of our lives, resulting in a modern, digital society that feels a lot like the wild, wild west. I am thrilled to be working with HarperCollins to share some of my own crazy experiences on the front lines of social media, and to inspire people of all ages to embrace technology, as well as the new set of social norms that come along with it.

As for what to expect from the "lifestyle" parts of the book, you can't do better than to sample Z's Dot Complicated newsletter and blog. (Invites to the newsletter are apparently pretty easy to come by, as I had no trouble acquiring one – though you never know when the velvet rope will go up.) The blog, for instance, currently features:

But even a talent as unassuming as Randi Zuckerberg can't be confined to one book. She'll also publish a children's picture book simultaneously with Dot Complicated, about which she and HarperCollins had virtually nothing else to say. If you needed a new reason to fear for the next generation, you're apparently in luck.

Both books are due out in the fall. At least you have plenty of time to brace yourself.

It's 2013. Social media is no longer new. It's a mature medium, one that has been woven into the fabric of consumer life online. So why are brands still determined to act like naive tourists, blundering around a foreign land and upsetting the natives? It's time to take back control.

Brands have been lectured for the last few years on the need to let go of the vice-like grip on their brand, to hand over control to their customers in social media. And it's true that social media has ushered in a new age of transparency, where customers want a far greater stake in any brand they interact with.

But this doesn't mean you can shrug your shoulders and simply launch your brand unguided onto a social network. In fact, it's your responsibility to guide your customers' social experience. And that means welcoming them back to your home online.

Almost all of the most embarrassing recent social media blunders took place on Facebook and Twitter; which offer brands little control over their campaigns or messaging.

Forget Likes, Fans & Followers

It's frankly shameful so many brands are still asking social media to deliver likes, fans, followers, views and channel performance indicators, not business results.

Forward-thinking brands ask social media to deliver things that make business sense. Things like higher customer satisfaction, greater loyalty, reduced support costs and increased revenue.

Social media can be a game-changer, but only when we get serious about the social customer experiences. It's really not that difficult.

First, we must face the facts about social networks like Facebook - they just don't constitute a viable social media strategy. They're almost certainly not where you want to make your home. Only .5% of fans ever mention the brands they like on Facebook and just 2% of fans return to Facebook brand pages a second time.

If you really want to engage with your customers on social channels, you need to engage on your own social hubs: customer forums, blogs and communities.

When cosmetics retailer Sephora realized it had little ability to truly engage its nearly 1 million Facebook fans, for example, the company built its own social hub, Beauty Talk. Sephora now has the ability to engage and enlist their social customers to participate - and Beauty Talk members spend 10x more than the average customer.

Driving this kind of outcome is simply not possible on Facebook.

Social Media Is Not A Silo

Today, only a shocking 11% of companies say their social strategy is guided by insights from other business groups. This means 89% of social strategy happens in a silo. To drive social customer experience to the strategic level, it's essential to get others involved - across marketing, support and sales.

Measure What's Important

Now, start measuring the actual impact of your social media strategy. Ban the pointless hunt for buzz, likes, comments, high fives - what do they really mean for your business?

Instead, move to the same metrics you apply to any other area of your business, like reduced costs, greater satisfaction and increased revenue.

Once you have these foundations in place, it's time to scale. A single Twitter campaign can create an ocean of comments. How do you deal with that flood? By enabling your social customers to help each other. Skype community members help more than 3 million customers per month and resolve 70% of cases on first contact. Hewlett Packard's social customers handle 20% of the company's global support.

With nearly 1.5 billion people using online social networks today, social media can no longer remain an afterthought - a sandbox for dabbling. Brands need to treat their social media investment as a core part of their long-term business transformation, not as a specific activity that you want to check off the list. Anything less just isn't serious.

The unsung hero of online love is the infrastructure that supports these dating applications. As more people turn to online and mobile dating, databases containing profile info, photos and messages between users continue to grow as well. The scale means that innovative tools are needed – along with more powerful infrastructure – to keep matching up potential pairs.

Cupid’s Changing Industry

It’s estimated that in 2010, users spent more than twice the amount of time connecting to dating websites than they did using mobile dating apps. Just one year later, in 2011, these numbers flipped, as users began spending slightly more time on dating apps than websites. Whatever platform users prefer, online dating is booming as services use technology to match up people with shared interests and values.

These well-connected users have helped propel the online dating industry to top $1 billion in annual revenues, providing online dating websites with even more reason to continue searching for innovative solutions.

Of course, this kind of growth adds more stress to mobile and wireless networks, not to mention the servers hosting the applications – a welcome challenge for online dating providers.

Match.com found out how important scalability was when it began struggling to keep up with a growing user base and its 70 terabytes of data. With an upgraded SQL Server solution from Microsoft, Match.com was able to move user data across more than 100 servers in two seconds, while also providing sufficient infrastructure for future growth.

Big Data Meet Online Dating

While many users may not see, or care, how data is crunched to help them find the perfect mate, database admins, Big Data scientists and mathematicians all play an important role in formulating the perfect match.

When a user signs up on eHarmony, for example, they are required to fill out a 400-question profile outlining personal preferences, physical traits, hobbies and many other telling details. Using that data, an Oracle 10G database makes a few suggestions for possible matches.

Then the real magic happens.

The system compares the users extensive list of answers to the site’s 20 million other users – a process that requires a billion calculations for each bachelor or bachelorette. After comparing information using a sophisticated algorithm, the site provides the user with matches. eHarmony’s dataset alone exceeds 4 terabytes of total data, not including photos and other information.

These fine-tuned formulas and powerful datacenters are the trade secret of these online dating services. As users change preferences, provide feedback on proposed matches and refine their profiles, eHarmony uses that information to refine search results for proposed matches.

Optimizing For True Love

Just like with any database, the quality of output is based on data input. Users who accurately answer questions and provide truthful information are likely to receive the best love matches.

Considering the human element, though, perfect matches venture far beyond math and science. Even if every user tried to be completeley honest in their responses, personality matches might not be completely accurate. People often perceive themselves differently than how the rest of the world sees them.

Some observers look for an objective system of understanding potential compatibility, while others believe a completely automated matchmaking service that removes human input could never work.

Most likely, the next innovations in compatibility science will be come through a technological love triangle, where advanced hardware and software solutions in enterprise and hyperscale datacenters will enable development of unique new applications that can help real people find true love more efficiently.